


saccharine

by honey_sweet



Category: Red Dead Redemption 2
Genre: F/M, Fluff, I suck at tags, Slow Burn, Spoilers, but also a badass, future smut probably, reader is a Mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-09-05 00:07:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16799770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_sweet/pseuds/honey_sweet
Summary: ‘You people venerate savagery. And you will die, savagely.’She had a hand in this. Arthur at the right, her at the left. And for a while the two managed it - dragged them all out of the darkness so they could keep going just a little bit longer.And she is trusted to be a second in command, part of a unit - she doubts it will all end well, and her past appears to have abandoned her anyway.





	1. Saccharine

**Author's Note:**

> saccharine ; overly sweet or sentimental.

She had decided that snow, the pure essence of wintry weather, cold and wet and unforgiving - she had decided that it was the worst. Undoubtedly the worst.  
It sapped the strength of the horses dragging the wagons up impossible summits; it weighed heavy on the clothing protecting her, sometimes soaking slowly through to the skin; but most of all it numbed them all at the same time ... men, women and children alike all miserable in the type of dark that couldn’t be discerned - was it simply midnight or was the snow too thick for light to penetrate?

She sullenly sat by his right hand, riding at the front of the convoy felt less like an honour now the snow was bouncing off her body like she was a human windbreak; as fast as her horse could muster they clawed their way through the snows and carved their own path for once, being daringly divergent for a change. 

They were all waiting to see him return. And though none would admit, they were all anxious for it.

It seemed like the storms would swallow them at times, only the yellowish lamplight keeping it at bay though not for long.

She had the tears in those saccharine eyes threatening to spill over her scowl. And though it wasn’t from the blood freezing on the clamped hand at her hip, they were from the ache of absence, the coldness where company should be. And right then it could have been almost anyone and she still would have closed her eyes and imagined him. 

‘Abigail says he’s dying, Dutch.’ 

Davey.  
Davey,  
Is dying.

She should be dead when she paused to consider it all - no one lives through things like that. She should also not be riding here, risking falling and not getting up again - not like anyone would pick her up this time.

‘If we don’t stop someplace soon we’re all gon die,’  
‘I know, I sent Arthur out ahead. He’ll be back.’

They had all better come back.  
Jenny was lost - she had only been in your company a short time so the sting of burying her corpse was not as painful as if she had to bury Hosea, or John, or Arthur.  
Then there was Davey, rattling his death moans in the wagon beside her, a ragged sound that made her think his own soul was rattling his own body in an attempt to escape. 

He would be gone soon too.

Mac was nowhere - for all anyone knew he was alive and hiding out. But that hope was slim too.  
Sean, too, could be dead for all the knowledge anyone here had - but she refused to think that the most suprisingly vicious people she had ever reigned in under her command, were dead.  
She thought it anyway, for all the good the refusals did.

Then there were the others.

Micah, first went into the storm and truthfully she was glad to see him leave. Dutch’s left hand seemed to have a burning disgust for the weasel, always slinking around camp trying to coerce the newest woman into some torturous fun - to which it was her self appointed job to reign the bastard in.  
John went next, diverging from Micah’s path.  
‘Half a days ride ‘un return. If you don’t find nothing, come back.’ 

Then it was her turn to be the second in command - Arthur was sent into the abyss by Dutch.  
‘Find us home, son. Save us.’  
What a weight to simply drop on someones shoulders.  
Then she watched as Taima and Arthur vanished slowly.

‘Check the rear, girl. Round us up again. I want them all seen to now - horses and folk all the same.’

Nothing was said to agree or disagree - she wouldn’t be heard over the storm anyway - she nodded her best to Hosea and hoped Dutch understood.  
Wheeling round slowly, she leaned back to take the weight off her mount as they rode downhill slightly to the back of the convoy.  
Scarf around the face, she halted and waited for the last yellowish lamp of Dutch’s wagon to pass her by. 

As the second wagons came past, she moved alongside at the same pace and looked for Javier driving; she ripped her scarf away to call his attention.  
‘All good? I’m on round up duty.’  
‘Si, pero ... I am as far from home as I can be, señorita!’  
‘Horses faring well?’ she smiled, understanding the simple spanish Javier provided her.  
‘If we move slowly.’ replied Charles, resting one hand on a pistol as he protected the women against the wall of the wagon.  
‘Hand? Working?’ was about all she could get out in the force of the wind.  
‘I can shoot don’t worry. You don’t have to retire me yet.’ Charles said repositioning the lanterns slightly for the wagons behind them.

She nodded, ‘I’ll go find some things to get that burn sorted - I know cold mountains like these,’  
Charles nodded grimly, the bandage on his hand looked disgusting but there was none to spare else she would have a bandage and not a hand clamped over her bullet wounds.  
Peering now to the women, she surveyed them and most appeared asleep or simply huddled for warmth.  
She did not distract Mary-Beth from her whiskey bottle.

Little Jack was leaning against Charles, hiding from the wind. It was a sorry sight but it brought an odd joy to her to see that caring temperament come through.  
‘Tell me a story, please. I love your stories.’  
Charles simply looked up at her on her horse, riding alongside, ‘You’d best give the boy what he wants, now.’ 

‘There was a mountain. And there lived a small kingdom, tiny and undiscovered at the top. The snows were so grand that no one had ever cut through them so this little kingdom was alone in the cold. Until, a group, a family, they climbed the mountain with only a little yellow lantern to guide them.’  
She stumbled on her words as the pain roiled at her core and reached out to tap the lantern softly, twice with her bloodied hand. A soft distraction to allow her to recollect the language that had left her when the pain rolled in. The gesture was not unnoticed. 

‘Just like this one, it turned the world around them yellow, like sunlight. It was gold and wonderous, the only thing that showed them the way. See, Jack, these people were afraid.’  
‘Of what?’ the child deplored.  
‘That the snow would never stop! So in the night, the first night, they huddled together in the snow around their yellow lantern. And by morning, the snow had piled up around them, except for where their lantern still softly glowed. So they carried on walking now it was clear, and when they reached the top of the mountain, the kingdom was there, calling to them. Lanterns hung from every surface and though it was day, it was still so dark that all they had was lanterns like fireflies swinging in the winds.’

‘Did they live there?’  
‘They do now.’ She smiled, ‘And if you see any lights, best be quiet or you’ll scare the people in their castle and homes. But if we come along their kingdom, we shall give them our lanterns and they will let us live there. Forever, Jackie.’

Charles looked melancholy, like that had stirred something in him, or maybe he still had some childlike wonder trapped behind those years of violence. She had never heard Javier silent for so long, so she simply smiled and allowed Jack to stare at the lanterns on the wagons, the women now alseep if they werent already.

‘They’ll be back soon.’ She smiled as she halted. The wagon to keep moving along. 

Pearson did not look best pleased on the last wagon she had come to. 

‘How is it, old man?’ 

‘We have no food. I can’t bring myself to tell Dutch that.’

‘I have it sorted, don’t worry.’ 

‘Food?’

‘No, Dutch.’ she grimaced now, about to black out but passing it off like she was simply freezing cold.

‘Horses?’

‘They’ll make it tonight but like us they’re dying. They can’t do this anymore than we can. We have to rest.’

‘I know Pearson. Take it slowly.’ She said, patting the side of the wagon as it rolled next to her.

  


‘How is it there, Lenny?’ She asked.

‘Cold, as youre aware.’ He smiled, rifled leaning against his leg. He was sat at the back of the last wagon in the convoy keeping watch.

’If you need it, I can swap you with someone else so you can sleep.’

‘You look like you need it more than I do.’ 

  


‘Lenny, I’m okay.’ 

‘You’d better be or Dutch wont be best pleased.’ He quipped.

‘Yah, I know,’ She smiled, ‘Fire that gun if you need me.’

‘Gotcha, Captain.’

  
Slowly, she returned to Dutch. As she moved up alongside the convoy, word was being passed down that Arthur had returned. Coming once again alongside Javier, he said: ‘You need that seeing to, querida.’

’It aint that bad, honest.’

‘You should sleep though at the least,’ replied Charles from behind her.

‘When we stop then maybe I will.’ ‘Oh you definiately will or Charles will be angry at ya!’ Slurred Mary-Beth.

‘I am sure he will be,’ she smiled as she rode off again.

‘How is it back there?’ Hosea grimaced as she returned to the left hand of Van der Linde.

‘So-so, Charles and Javier said their horses should move slowly. Strauss’ horses are the only that don’t seem tired, nah, Pearson and Lenny? They need to rest the horses too ought they die tonight.’

‘Arthur returned a short while ago, he’s leading us to a small mining town not too far along. They’ll all make it tonight.’ Dutch promised.

She just nodded and moved alongside the wagons at His left hand.


	2. Enervate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apologies in advance i got a little swear-y with this chapter haha :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> enervate ; to feel drained of energy or vitality
> 
> ***ALSO HOLY SHIT - this is my first fanfic on here, but ive written before for people ... i did NOT expect people to actually enjoy this holy hell, 7 kudos in a day is absolutely amazing to me y’all are so hecking sweet thank you so much xxx ***

‘Bring him in here!’ called Hosea, peeking inside a cabin and thrusting the lantern in to guide them.  
Everyone dashed off the wagons, leaving the most able bodied to offload wagons and horses. All the while, she sat astride her horse and wondered how she would get down with her abdomen in such condition.

Abigail and Tilly carried Davey in carefully, followed by the women, Reverend Swanson and Miss Grimshaw - all ready to ease Davey’s passing. Hasty commands were given inside the cabin to warm the place up and start a fire, while outside the wagons were lead towards the barns and the poor, ragged horses were settled as best they could be. Charles was leading them in pairs from the wagons, while inside the barn Javier was removing saddlery and tending carefully to leather sores. She rode into the barn and pulled up at the end of the decrepit structure, swinging one leg over the rump of her mount and dropping to the floor with a hiss and an ungraceful grunt of pain.  
Again, the gesture did not go unnoticed.

Leading her steed with one hand, she allowed Javier to handle the horse, staring at her sympathetically for a second before he was moving along again to rest the exhausted animal.  
She grimaced, looking down at herself and allowed her frozen fingers to finally twitch over the wound - it was clotted with blood and the flesh had frozen slightly to the fabric of her clothing. She just hoped it was too cold for the wound to fester or else she would die here and Dutch’s left hand would be buried with Davey on the mountain.

Arthur came inside the barn, dismounted Taima and thanked Charles sincerely for allowing him to borrow the mare, then he departed quickly to be at Dutch’s right hand in case there were orders to be recieved and plans to be made. See, she knew the difference between Arthur and herself: Arthur did plans, he did scams, he was the gunman and the outrider. While she was like the sergeant, keeping morale up and everyone in check, not to metion the extra work she put in for manual jobs and the errands she ran at Dutch’s whims.  
Together she and Arthur worked seamlessly as a unit, they had for nearly 20 years now, and they would continue to fight the good fight until they could no longer. They were each others comfort when no one understood the jobs - sharing whiskey gratefully and feeling morose together when they wondered if they had failed as the unit Dutch relied on them to be.

Charles arrived at her side, his warmer hands guiding her own frozen limbs to sit down on a crate inside the barn.  
‘Let me see,’ he gently commanded, settling one knee on the ground and melting her hands away from the wound.  
‘It sure is nasty huh?’ she winced as he touched it tenderly to see where it was still bleeding.  
‘It hasn’t festered yet. You may yet make it, you know, if you don’t do anything stupid and lose more blood,’ he offered, applying his own pressure to the wound.

Hearing voices outside, she snapped up, body tense and rose from the crate. His hands dropped away from her, limp and bloodied. Charles was still kneeling on the floor while Javier was tending to one particularly hard-worked stallion that had no strength left in him.  
Outside the barn she heard Dutch and Arthur leaving.  
‘I never did have time to ask but what did go down on that boat back there?’ asked Arthur, muffled by the wooden planks on the wall.

Charles rose and lead away two horses Javier had not seen to yet, still saddled and seemingly energised - he took them outside and offered them to Arthur and Dutch.  
‘Need horses?’ he said, offering Taima and one sleek black shire horse that had no trouble pulling the wagons earlier. She emerged from the barn, spine straightened and carrying what appeared to be a semblance of composure underneath crippling pain.

She saw Dutch wave the shire off Charles, mounting The Count instead, while Arthur took Taima gratefully once more. When suddenly, she stepped quickly and swiftly into place, her left foot jammed into the stirrup, left hand grabbing the pommel and gaining friction- and she hopped once, deftly into the seat of the saddle and gathered the reins in her available hand.  
‘I’m comin too Dutch. I got the strength and I aint giving it up here to sit inside with a corpse.’  
Arthur opened his mouth to disapprove once he saw the blood splatter hastily gathered into fabric - her right hip covered completely with blood and her left hand splayed carefully over it.

‘I aint havi-‘ Arthur stared but he was interrupted by her riding on ahead of him.  
‘You are now. Let’s go please before we die out here,’ you pleaded.  
‘Charles go rest that hand!’ ordered Dutch over the snow as the three moved out.

She had been quiet, which was unusual and Arthur knew it. He had no idea how she got the injury - he wasn’t even on the boat when it happened - but from how Lenny and Charles had described it to him, she had taken a bullet to the right side of her stomach. And she had done it protecting John.  
It was something she would do, he thought. She would stand in the way of a bullet for anyone else. Perhaps not Micah, but she would do it for anyone else and he understood that.

It had happened once before, she had offered to take his place in a dire situation. Arthur had seen it then, his own death creep up on him when he was jumped by too many men all at once. And she was there, climbing down her mount quickly, talking softly and sweetly until she had traded her life for Arthur’s. There was nothing he could do but watch and screamed, begging for them to take him and not her as they forced her to her knees, placed the gun to the back of her neck... and nothing. She had survived that on the merits of Sean, John and Javier turning up on time to spring her away, Arthur too. 

And it was from that point on he saw he owed a debt to her. One she refused to accept payment on.

They made it through the snow carefully, slowly and guided only buy the small lanterns that swung violently in the winds. 

‘Is that someone coming towards us?’ Dutch asked, ‘Hey you up ahead, who are you?’ 

’Micah.’ Came the reply. ‘Found a little homestead up ahead, sounds like a party in there.’ he added, attempting to be useful to Dutch.

Dutch of course pounced on it, his greed disguised as his love for the gang and their dire circumstances without supplies. She glanced through the snow at Arthur, searching for his eyes and she wanted that company again now. The more blood she lost the more she wanted to be held by anyone - Charles had tempted her, it would only have taken a second and he would have held her without questions asked. That was why she tore herself away - there was work she had to do and she did not want to sleep there with him, she was afraid she ought not wake up the next morning.

Dutch moved on ahead, then Arthur gestured for her to lead along infront and he took the rear. It was hard to know how Arthur was faring, they had no time alone recently to lick their wounds like the beaten animals they were on the inside. She hadn’t seen him sleep, and she had barely seen anyone eat, least of all Arthur who had given his meagre meat rations to Jack and the solitary apple to his horse. She was worried about him.

He did not bother trying to hear what Micah was saying in front of him - it did not interest him anyway. Arthur was instead staring at her back, trying to discern if she was swaying from the gait of her horse or because she was delirious and losing too much blood. He hated how she was some days, plucked from the streets similarly to him, only a year or two afterwards - it seemed unfair, but then again what did an outlaw like himself know about being fair? She was wearing one of Sean’s heavy coats for once, but Arthur noticed that there was blood seeping through the back slowly, and more snow piling up on the great shoulders of the furred coat. That girl (well she was as old as him almost, like Charles or Javier, or less appealingly, Bill Williamson) so Arthur was not sure why he called her girl still, but either way she was going to be the death of him, and herself if she was not careful.  
He was worried about her.

They arrived at the top of a hill overlooking the homestead Micah had staked out - lights were indeed glowing and the faint yells of a party and the music drifted towards them.  
‘Hitch the horses down there, then you three get into cover. One lost man looks a lot less threatening than four mean looking degenerates.’ Dutch ordered, dismounting and hitching The Count.

She stumbled, pretending she had hit a tree stump and tripped, and carried on walking towards Arthur. She dropped her back heavily against the wall of the shed they were crouched in, Arthur rested one hand on her knee and another on his revolver should he need to defend Dutch. She waved him off, trying to groan quietly as she raised herself onto one knee and palmed her own pistol in her right hand. She fingered the wheel, allowing it to spin to check there were bullets in the chambers.  
‘I don like you being here, like that.’ Arthur mumbled at her, moving the hand that was on her knee to hover over her right hip.  
‘Aint nothing or id be dead yet wouldn I?’  
she grimaced.

‘Arthur, Arthur!’ whispered Micah heavily, ‘Theres a body in the wagon here.’  
‘Okay wait for my go,’ he replied. The softness was gone and he retrieved his hand slowly from her side.  
He aimed.  
She aimed slower.

And then the doors of the cabin burst open, bullets flying now and it was all she could do to try and remove Dutch from danger. She protected him directly, anyone fired at him se had him sighted. Arthur had longer-range defence, attackers in the cabin and behind barns he picked off. Micah was just wildly shooting, revelling in the chaos it appeared. 

It was over before it began, and that is just how it goes in a shoot out. Brutally, there is defening silence once the gunshots cease and there is no one left to try and shoot you.  
‘Arthur, I said wait for my lead!’ called Dutch.  
‘Well it dint seem to be goin too well,’ Arthur replied, holstering his weapon and pointing at the corpse in the wagon. He offered her a hand up now, and usually she would refuse and try get up on her own, she grabbed it this time, her fingers slick with fresh blood she had to grip tightly to gain purchase and stand.

She nodded, neither of them anything in the way of thanking the other after all these years. They departed, and their bodies were once again starved of human touch.

‘Micah, bring the horses closer. My girl, check the barn please. Arthur, you search the house with me. We need essentials - food, medicine, whiskey.’  
She departed slowly, breaking through the snow and headed towards the barn. She could hear the rattling of bottles and drawers as they tore apart the house and the soft whinny of her shire as Micah brought them to the house like he was ordered.

The barn seemed quiet apart from the frantic neigh of a singular horse inside. She hoped there was no one inside but drew her pistol anyway as she pushed the great oaken doors open. Taking two steps inside, a man dropped on her from above, clearly he’d been in the raftings. He shoved her aside sending the pistol flying until it ricocheted off the wall and lodged into the quarmire of the stable floor.

‘You shot my cousin!’ drawled the man.  
‘Ya well he started it, cunt.’ she spat, three days of anger spilling up and out of her all at once.  
He threw a punch first and she simply stepped back, gauging how far he could reach and how slow he was.  
She stepped back again as he tossed another punch her way casually, but she pounched when he exposed his ribs. Soft flesh came yielding easily under her foot as she used the only form of physical attack she could right now. He saw she was weak, anyone could see that, and used his brute strength to pin her struggling body to the ground. 

He was over her, all at once trying to force a knife down at her, which she forced her forearms against and pushed back with all the force a cornered beast like herself could muster. Heavy and cloying, the air stung her eyes and she punched him hard in the temple, the soft flesh surrendered to her hand and he eased off slightly.

‘What is going on here?’ Dutch called, pistol raised.  
She spun, throwing her weight, whatever was left of it now she was starved and shot - and dying essentially - and rolled over the man.  
Arthur noticed it might have been an intimate display if they weren’t attempting to kill each other - she was splayed over him, one knee resting at his left side, the other was her foot jammed into the mud beside him. Fist raised, she was grabbing his shirt with one hand and smacked seven shades of shit out of him. 

‘Fucker jumped me.’ She said, pausing from her attack.  
Arthur held her arm back slightly and pulled her off of him, one hand pushed her slowly towards Dutch while his other hand gripped the shirt collar she was previously restricting.  
‘What are you doing up here?’  
‘We was gonn hit a train, ‘splosives and such i aint know more than that i swear!’ begged the wretch, all the while she had retrieved her pistol that had been discarded previously.

‘Do what you want with him but bring that horse when you’re done,’ Dutch departed.  
Arthur hit the man a whole lot harder than she had, and when the answers to the questions were no longer useful then he tightened his hands around the mans throat, squeezing until frothy blood bubbled up and spilled past bluish lips and the man stopped kicking.

‘You okay?’ Arthur asked, reaching out to study her face and draw her closer.  
‘Ya he dint get me,’ she replied.  
‘C’mon faster we leave the faster you get that seen ta,’ he prompted, reaching for the horse in the stable and leading it out.  
As they headed towards the house they heard a commotion, bottles smashing and furniture groaning and thudding.  
They dashed for the sound, hearing yelling and screaming.

‘What the hell Micah?’ yelled Dutch.  
‘I was just havin some fun fellers!’ he cried, as the woman in the nightdress launched a bottle at Micah. She made a mental note to thank the stranger later for giving Micah a bottle to the shoulder.  
‘Miss we aint gon hurt you I promise, hes just being a twat.’ She said, approaching slowly. The stranger’s features softened and before the woman could reply Micah overturned the table and a stray lanter caught ablaze on the carpet.  
‘Micah you idiot!’ yelled Arthur, grabbing Micah by his shoulder and pushing him out the door. She and Dutch reached for the woman, coaxing her out of the blaze.

‘We aint all like him I promise,’ she reassured once they were in the snows again, ‘We may be bad people but we aint him. He’s just one big bastard and you did good clocking him wi’ that bottle,’ she continued, removing Sean’s coat and draping it over the woman’s shoulders.  
‘Excuse the blood Miss, but it’ll keep ya warm.’

Dutch offered the woman a seat on the back of his horse, and Arthur watched the other woman now, as Dutch’s left hand was busy threading rope from her saddle to the bridle of the stolen horse. Micah was already mounted and ready to leave so she and Arthur hopped respectfully onto their mounts, all the time she was holding the rope on her saddle tightly.

‘What’s your name miss...?’ Dutch offered.  
‘Adler. Sadie Adler. He- I- They....’  
‘Itll be okay now Mrs Adler. We aint good people, but we aint like them thats for sure.’ Dutch hushed.  
‘He was my husband.’  
‘I’m sorry for you, Ma’am,’ offered Arthur and then he settled again into silence.

Upon arriving back at Colter, Dutch ordered the women to help Sadie and kep her warm. Charles and Javier emerged from the cabin and took it upon themselves once more to lead away the horses. Arthur followed them, thanking Charles for Taima probably, and then asking them for a favour it appeared.

Dutch vanished in the direction of the cabin Grimshaw had appointed him, stating he hadn’t slept ‘in three days.’ 

She dismounted again, heading for the barn with the hulking shire and the new horse they had claimed from Adler Ranch.  
‘Chica, how do you manage this? Blood, how you say, everywhere!’ Javier reprimanded, adding emphasis on his accent in an attempt to cheer her up using dramatic grandeur.  
‘Come with us,’ Charles said, the last of the horses now away and settled.

She followed, ‘I just wanna sleep honestly fellas.’  
‘You will but you need that sorting out, darlin’,’ offered Arthur, leading her to the main cabin almost, where Davey had lain dead earlier.  
‘Grimshaw? Help please.’ Arthur commanded in a tone that made it sound like a question.

‘What have you done?’ Grimshaw said, fussing over her. ‘Sit up here girl and we’ll get that cleaned. Charles, you need that hand seeing to aswell.’  
He tried to protest but accepted it would heal faster if they tended to it aswell.

She removed her own jacket that she has been wearing underneath Sean’s huge furred greatcoat. She wanted that back, she thought, remembering Sadie still claimed it.  
Arthur produced some whiskey from his satchel and tossed Javier something to rewrap Charles’ hand.  
Meanwhile, Grimshaw had a wet cloth, and it was warmed in a pot of water over the fire so the sensation was not bad in itself.  
Arthur looked at her, lying down on the table where a corpse had been less than an hour ago, and he searched her eyes for permission to lift her shirt to the rib at the most. Grimshaw washed the blood away and the three men all grimaced at the sight of the wound that had slowly frozen.  
‘I’m afraid this might burn a lot, so boys, hold her legs please. It won’t feel good my darling but it stops you dying so you can’t complain.’

Arthur and Javier gripped her ankles at the far end of the table, while Charles pinned her shoulders.  
‘I can completely complain about this, Susan,’ she quipped from the corpse table.  
She made no more jokes as the liquid was thrust into the torn flesh. Burning, hellfire like agony seared the raw skin and blood underneath. Tears welled up in her eyes yet she did not scream. She kicked strongly, yet she did not make a sound other than and initial grunt of agony.  
When she thought it should stop it kept going, kept burning.  
‘Okay please, that must be it surely?’ she begged, forcing against Charles’ grip on her shoulders. It was worse than any torture she could imagine. And she could imagine a lot of things.

‘Sit her up.’ Grimshaw ordered. ‘Mr. Smith, hold the shirt up. I’m going to pass this around and you have to keep it tight and with pressure Mr. Morgan or else the whole thing is useless. So pressure, do you hear me?’  
As the bandages were wound around her hip, she pondered how Susan Grimshaw may well be the scariest member of their gang. She liked to think that anyway, it amused her.

‘Tilly? You’re awake aren’t you sweet, take her to her room please she needs sleep, and if you have food spare down there Arthur could do with some too.’ Grimshaw passed her sentence and no one argued.

Tilly vanished temporarily to gather some bread, hard and slightly stale, or maybe it was frozen. No body could tell anyway.  
Javier wound an arm underneath the woman’s shoulder and allowed her to stand, asking which way he was going with the patient. Arthur and Charles vanished to their own cabins, seemingly as enervated as she was. 

Once Tilly and Javier had left her to sleep, it was a fitful night of pain and rolling in the dark.


	3. Lex Talionis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lex Talionis ; the law of retaliation where the punisment resembles the crime.

Arthur woke, initially shocked by the unfamiliar surroundings of the cabin, but he adjusted slowly to the sound of Dutch and Hosea speaking outside the room.  
He stirred, rose and headed outside - nodding to Hosea and Dutch on the way - and was once again in the snows. 

She was already awake, she had been since before dawn. Not intentionally, she had nightmares marauding her mind while she tried to sleep, and she woke screaming twice, thankful that Charles was the only other sleeping in the cabin and he wouldn’t judge her over her troubled sleep.  
She had moved through her cabin, disgruntled to remember she had given Sean’s coat to Sadie last night - and accepted she would just have to be cold for now. The ‘main’ cabin was simply the one where most people gathered as it was the largest and had more space for a fire. Unsure of what to do with her awkward limbs - they were stiff and moved like boards presumably from the trauma of the last few days, but realistically it could be the harsh bed she slept on the night before - she clunkily moved a chair to beside the fire and settled down.

Nobody was there yet.

Aching, she longed for Blackwater again. Home.  
She wasn’t usually sentimental but taking a bullet to the belly had changed her these last few days and not in a way she liked. She wanted it all back:  
She wanted Hosea to take her and Arthur swindling in high society; she wanted Davey and Mac to horse race her through the streets; she wanted Jenny to come begging for gossip; she wanted John to track horses with her; she wanted Charles to spirit her away into the woods to hunt; she wanted Javier to play poker until dawn; she wanted Sean to drink her into the night, cause some chaos and a bar fight - so in the morning Arthur could come bail them out of whatever cell they’d landed in the night before... those were the best mornings, especially if Javier and Bill had joined in the drinking, Charles would ride along with Arthur and a spare horse so she would hitch a ride back to camp behind one of the boys; and most of all, she wanted Dutch to invite her into his tent with Hosea and Arthur, so they could scheme the early hours of the morning away.  
She wanted it all - and the bullet that had ripped through her had changed her perspective on it all. If she had her way, the cabins would fall away into Blackwater’s townhouses, the snow would melt into cobbles and she would walk back to camp right now to be soothed to sleep by their campfire in good company.

She woul-  
‘Morning,’ interrupted Arthur, heading for the coffee and removing his hat to shake out his short, damp hair, ‘Sleep well?’  
‘Not hear me screaming?’ She snorted, ‘Because Charles sure did, poor bastard.’ She rubbed her temples, digging her elbows into her knees as she leant forward in her chair. Arthur just nodded, processing what she had just said and bending over to start boiling coffee on the dawn’s firelight.  
‘Any pain?’  
‘Only when I move too fast...’ She grunted, standing up shakily ‘Or when I breathe,’ she added with a dry laugh.

Arthur let the coffee boil over the fire and poured them both small mugs of the brown liquid - he had been watching her pace cautiously, she was still trying to warm herself up.  
‘Not got no coat back yet?’ He asked, handing her a mug and gesturing subtly to her flimsy undershirt and bodice.  
‘Felt bad asking for it last night,’ she shrugged, taking a sip of coffee.  
‘Oh so y’all happily rob a fella but won’t ask for a coat back? Who knew you of all people had morals?’  
‘Hey, I’ve morals yaknow - just the wrong kind,’ she smiled, a hand piled up her loose hair onto her head and she looked to her right, out the window while sipping her coffee.  
She was beautiful - not that Arthur had the leading authority on beauty he thought - but she was something he could draw easily without having to embellish grace or emotion. He knew when he closed his eyes how the curve of her chin would be, the arch of her eyebrows and the high, smooth plains of her cheekbones. 

He had drawn her before, after all, so he would know how fine a specimen she is to capture.  
That one sketch, laboured over for hours, was Sean’s favourite, as bittersweet as that was to Arthur; he was glad someone appreciated her, yet he was ashamed he had chosen Mary over a woman who had lived a life like his own and would not thrust him away because of who he was. Because of him and what be had done, and who he had done it to.

‘I’ll get it back for ya, since you’d think it stealing to have your man’s coat back.’  
Arthur offered, finishing his drink.  
‘He ain’t my- nevermind.’ She started, then decided the arguement wasn’t worth it. Sean was sweet on her perhaps, but there was something in her that made her guilty, made her wrong for loving - she always thought it would end with her hurting him. And part of her didn’t want to give in to love, it was painful and hurtful in her eyes. It ended, and nothing compares to the ache of someone missing, someone not being there anymore. But god was it something sweet- that feeling or warmth in the night after sinful acts in the dark, and the mornings where everything didn’t seem alright you had someone there to hold you for a while. She had savoured it while it lasted, but her man was not her man anymore. He was not even with her now. 

‘Morning, you two.’ Hosea nodded as he closed the door. ‘I believe Bill wishes to speak to you Arthur, something about an O’Driscoll camp nearby. ‘’Paying old friends a visit,’’ - thats what he said to me yesterday.’  
‘Thanks Hosea, I’ll go see him when the drunk wakes up.’  
‘Could be noon tomorrow before he’s awake,’ she smiled, hand on bound hip as she walked back to the fire. 

More people filtered in and out slowly, yet Arthur did not leave her sitting alone.  
‘We ain’t had much time to talk recently, have we?’ He begun, sitting on a table facing the chair she was propped in by the fire.  
‘You right, we ain’t - but we been so busy is all,’ she sighed, making lingering eye contact.  
‘I don’t like the whole O’Driscoll thing right now.’ Arthur mumbled, unsure what to think.  
‘Dutch wants revenge, that’s what he gon’ get isn’t it?’ she shifted in her seat, knowing full well it was wrong right now for Dutch to be exacting revenge on the O’Driscolls when they faced starvation on this mountain. She shook her head, pushing the thought to the back of her mind again.  
‘You ever-‘ Arthur started, but was interrupted by Abigail walking in, seeming desperate.

‘Arthur, you seen John? Would ya mind looking for him?’  
‘Everything seems to work out for that boy, Abigail.’  
‘He ain’t been seen - not in two days.’ She begged, voice raising.  
‘At least go have a look, Javier and You are the only able bodied men we have around anymore.’ Hosea interjected.  
‘Hey, don’t I count no more?’ the other woman laughed, putting her feet up on the table opposite her. Charles just looked at her from across the dark room, locked eyes and smiled a ghost smile while shaking his head at her.  
‘Come on, Arthur. I know he would do the same for me if I were in his place.’ replied Javier, putting out his cigarette and rising from where he sat.  
Arthur looked like he wanted to oppose, but followed Javier anyway out the door with only minimal grumbling.

‘What happened to Sean’s coat?’ Charles queried, raising a hand at her more exposed arms.  
‘Never got it ba- Speak of the devil, there’s Sadie.’ She said, excusing herself a second to head over to the widow and recieve a greatcoat thankfully.  
Charles watched, as he had been for a while now, how she moved this morning. Lacking strength still, she limped slightly and it pained him to see her bent slightly at the waist - a subtle change from her usually straight spined confidence and world stopping bravado.  
She seemed wearied, fragile, broken, almost. She slumped and slouched and sunk when she sat - where before she would lean forwards, formidable if she felt dangerous, or languidly backwards if she felt relaxed (Charles would not admit if asked, but he knew her habits and her quirks, the way she moved was an enigma he had cracked all those months ago.) Yet, it hurt him to see her like that. So broken. In his mind, she was the power in a carthorse, consistent and always in strong reserves, bound tight in muscles and primal strength, deadly will; so to see her crumbled by pain it was unsettling to say the least. A tide had shifted and he saw the waves of turmoil crash down within her from time to time.

Shrugging the garment back onto her shoulders, she returned to Charles.  
‘That is better, I tell ya,’ She said, sighing contently at the warmth it provided. ‘I gotta see Pearson, before I starve out here.’  
‘He doesn’t have anything, we all know it.’ Charles intervened.  
‘A girl can hope.’ She smiled, yet she was no longer a girl - almost the same age as Arthur and Charles.  


He did not want her alone, or at least that is how he excused himself, so he followed her out towards Pearson’s cabin where a low fire grumbled over the embers and glowing coals.  
‘I tell you I sent Lenny and Bill out hunting but they got nothing. You fancy doin your part for us?’  
‘Ya know, we gave the camp cook five minutes to grab essentials and go and you don’t bring one crumb of food.’ She chided.

After some tense back and forth, the cold and the pain was clearly getting to her as she was snapping at Pearson angrily, nipping at him like a wry fox.  
‘Enough, I can’t stand to hear you two bickering. I’ll go hunt.’ Charles interjected.  
She disagreed, rounding to him - ‘And what are you gonna do with that hand?’  
‘I’ll manage.’ He huffed.  
‘No - you track and I shoot. Can’t use a bow like that. Can ya?’ 

Together they trudged towards the barn, where last night Javier had taken over her job of caring for the horses. She didn’t like for him to assume her job like that - it wasn’t fair on him after all. Yet he did it anyway without complaint. She would thank him later, she thought as she opened the barn doors and headed for the freshly fed horses. Boaz and the new horse they’d claimed from the Adler ranch were missing, taken out by Javier and Arthur to hunt for John. 

Charles headed over to Taima, and proudly ran his hands down her back, along her withers, down her forlegs to feel the cannon bones and the hocks for sores. Taima was his pride, his joy. That bouncy appaloosa meant the world to him and she reflected that - like Charles she was docile and relaxed most of the time, staying to herself in a manner like her owner did. Yet, Taima could explode into speed and pure power just as Charles did.  
It always amused the woman, to watch the horses she cared for constantly mirror their masters.  
The Count, like Dutch was eccentric and ruled the herd, he was loud and everyone bowed to him.  
Silver Dollar micked Hosea’s good nature, strong and dependable - and the grey hair came as a matching set.  
Old boy was dark and brooding like John, a powerful nature undermined by the youthful insolence that accompanied it. She could list the similarities: Brown Jack - all portly and rotund like Bill, and it made her wonder: was her horse a reflection of herself? Her steed was tall and burly, strong physically and strong willed to add to it. A giant, hulking war horse. Hungarian Half-Breed, with perhaps a touch of Percheron in the blood. Dappled steel white-grey coat faded to a darker stippled belly like an oil painting come to life. White mane and tail streaked with charcoal and thick - perhaps it was silver and iron on some occasions where the sunlight spilled onto it. Muscular legs tapered downwards and short black hair rimmed the broad hooves; smooth and glossy in summer but now they were soggy with wet snow and mud tainting them a dull, miserably murky colour. The main blood was clearly Hungarian, however, which showed clear through the heavy set head and shoulders brimmed with thick hair and forelock spilling over large brown eyes, white eyelashes drawing shocking contrast to beatiful face - grey like a stormy cloud, dull like iron and blackened in places as if coal dust settled on the mount. Stubborn, yet sprightly he was, a true reflection of the woman who rode the stallion. But then there was the fire in the belly of the monster. Like hers, it always glowed softly - her hate and her fire and her misery and her violence were never dormant, they were always active mildly, rumbling like the coals over a steam engine, and only exploding into pure fire and brimstone and smoke when enraged. She could explode like that. Charles had seen it. And he knew what happened when she was enraged, and her war horse carried her into battle. It was not anything like Jack’s story books of nights and their noble steeds; the reality they shared was bloodier and nastier. He had seen her snap before, yet he couldn’t condemn her because he was equally as guilty for the same crimes - they all were here.

She saddled up with care, grumbling when she raised her arms too high to adjust the blanket and saddle on her horse. The wound was still sore and raw and burning in her belly, but it was healing. She just didn’t want to risk opening it again and bleeding to death once and for all this time.

She cracked it, eventually and lead her mount out to catch up with Charles. Deft, all muscle memory in practice, she hopped and pulled herself into the saddle with her right hand by the pommel and stepped her left foot into the stirrup. One smooth motion and her right leg had swung over the horse and onto the other side. 

They strode off at an even pace. 

Taima was only a hand or two shorter than Bluebird (the broad stallion) but Charles himself was not particularly dwarfed by the woman in his company. She wasn’t particularly small like most women compared to the men, her laboured lifetime had grown her strong and tall - yet some womanly features did not subdue to the work of her years. Even she would admit it, she looked young for her age. She was willowy-limbed, a tall woman only an inch or two shorter than Charles or Arthur, and an inch or so taller than Dutch (which she was proud of). So alongside Bluebird, Charles was not shadowed by the woman - he seemed almost her height on horseback.

‘Pearson doesn’t know what hes talking about. There’s animals out around here and they’ll be looking to feed now after that snowstorm.’ Charles observed, trotting Taima down a small rocky incline.  
‘You know what you’re doing here.’ She smiled softly, keeping her eyes out for tracks or movement in the treeline.

They passed through a small stream and Charles halted and dismounted on the other side.  
‘Best to go on foot from here,’ He stated, following the tracks with his gaze. He had taught her hunting back in Blackwater, around the forests to the north bordering Strawberry; she was good, but not as good as Charles. Nobody was as far as he was concerned.

Drawing the bow from her horse, she spotted tracks in the distance out from the treeline, then at the edge of the brook was three of them, pristine whitetails. They were ruffling through the snow, rummagaing for food, steam rising from their snouts and snow kicking up in soft clouds around their feet.  
She crouched next to Charles, knocking an arrow and gazing at the biggest one, the buck.

Antlers velvet and proud in the sun, stark against the white snow for miles. She aimed without drawing the string, lining up her shot first. Charles looked at her, one knee on the ground the other up as she knelt, spine straight and arms locked into the epitome of an archer’s draw. Steam poured from her mouth and the gas danced on the edge of her bottom lip, white clouds in the air around her full lips. They were luscious, really. Thick and full like a segment of fruit, plump and almost begging to be taken between a lover’s teeth and savoured languidly. 

She caught the drawstring between a nimble forefinger and thumb, drawing back her right arm to her chin, kissing her knuckle for a split second before releasing the string immediately. She stood, heading over to her kill and Charles followed.  
The arrow had sliced the air, dividing it like an oil tanker through waves, and it had lodged squarely in the skull of the animal. A quick, painless kill where the metal tip had shattered the bone and lodged it into the flesh of the buck. Its eyes rolled back as she lifted it to remove the arrow, a small blood splatter falling onto the snow like thick, bloodied honey.

Charles lifted it onto his shoulder and pointed her in the direction of the other two. 

Again, she knelt, drew the string to her chin and released in a split second. Another shot but this time through the neck. She winced thinking about it, still a quick death but extraordinarily more painful. Removing the arrow was harder this time as it had lodged through the windpipe, but she simpy decided to snap the wooden arrow and slide the metal arrowhead out in two halves. She pocketed the arrowhead. It was useful and harder to come by. 

On the ground she noticed what she had been looking for since her promise yesterday. Some small herbs speouted in a rocky growth by the fresh deer carcass. Inspecting them between her thumb and forefinger, she plucked the good ones and stashed them in her pockets. 

She then returned to the kill and hefted the deer- she grunted at the fire in her belly as the weight settled onto her shoulders. Upon returung to Charles and the horses, she stashed the carcass onto the back of her steed.  
‘Ready? or you wanna try for more?’ She suggested, leaning against Bluebird.  
‘Don’t wanna tire the horses with too much weight. This will be enough anyway.’ Charles said, mounting Taima.  
‘Hey don’t underestimate my boy now, yahear? Bluebird can carry two i’d betcha.’ She smirked, swinging herself into the saddle once again.

Pearson was delighted when they returned to say the least. Two pristine deer, fat and lean meat for tonight.  
Leading their horses back to the barn, she and Charles noticed Arthur and Javier riding back, John bloodied and mauled on the back of Boaz. Javier dismounted and dragged John inside, so she dashed for Boaz’s reins and lead him alongside Bluebird. Arthur followed her and Charles into the barn with his horse, seeming shattered and freezing cold despite the sun shining overhead. 

‘I’d better see to John.’ Said the woman, removing a bridle and hoping Arthur would help with the rest.  
‘Good luck, he gon be complaining about that scar for a long while now.’ mumbled Arthur, removing a stubborn girth from his saddle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’d really love to hear what people think of this story by the way - it only came about one night when i was walking home and started piecing together little stories that i thought wouldve been good.  
> so please tell me what yall think id honestly love to hear some criticism on this ; and thank you for reading is about all i have left to say...


	4. Abhor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abhor ; to regard with hate or disgust.

Abigail was finally content with her man. Yet, she complained and told him she hated him the entire time he was being stitched up.  
The other woman was just disgruntled that Abigail was in the god damn way. She knew John loved her, though it was debatable at times, but damn if that woman wasn’t in the way. She barely did work around camp either, and Dutch’s second had begun to notice. Arthur seemed a little blind to it - but after all he gets the good jobs delegated and other work from Dutch that isn’t managing camp from time to time.  
Like that O’Driscoll camp. 

12 neat stitches, carefully tied in rows. All along John’s right cheek up to the bridge of his nose. That was difficult to clean out, as the blood was thick and clotted. It oozed like melted caramel from the gouge along with the occasional dribble of what could only be wolf saliva - slightly crystallised and thickened by the time John had been freezing to death.

Underneath the stitches, the red mark of death had marred Marston’s face. It was not the first time that had happened, and she doubted it would be the last either. Arthur was right, that boy was lucky and everything turned out alright in the end. Hell if he deserved it though. There was no love lost between the two as she often observed John ignoring his own son, his ‘wife’ in all manners but lawfully, and she wanted to hit the man, to show him the world that had upturned and given him something. Given him something to live for yet all he seemed to do was try to die. 

She could hardly blame him for trying to die, though. She had tried after killing her first man.  
That was perhaps the first time Arthur was ever conflicted about the woman. She was not yet into the small gang, firey and troubled youth still coiled like a rattlesnake inside of her. She may have been the only gang member to come and beg them, right at their feet, to kill her. Or if they wouldn’t, she begged them to give her a gun and she would do it herself. 

Dutch had taken no time with that, he had lifted her and his sentences left her defenceless - she was succumbed to charm now like a cougar to raw meat. What she had done though, left her angry still.  
Dutch’s words could not take away what she had done. He built her a world of words to subdue her, to distract. It was what he did, cast the illusion of freedom in the form of an iron cage. She had learnt. She was probably still inside that cage to Dutch, where now after 20 years she saw herself as free. 

That man, well. Boy. He was the first. He was not the last, all he had served to do was to spark a match into a world of dry forests - starting a fire that would burn endlessly it seemed. She had put a knife in his skull. Right through his eye. A boy did not steal from her again. 

Arthur was young, still finding his way in the world. He was perhaps 16, trying to stand straight next to the grandeur of a youthful Dutch and Hosea who seemed to have changed immeasurably since they met. Wiry and thin and covered in dirt and blood and brains and wet from the river-  
She was young too, and kneeling there begging to die. How could you kill someone then want your life to trade? Arthur spent years mulling it over. It didn’t fit together in himself, a puzzle piece had been switched with another and the picture seemed distorted ever since.  
Why would a woman have a wish so dire to die? What had she seen in the short life before they met her? She had only left breadcrumbs as a flimsy trail her life:  
What, Who and Why.  
‘Oh just a man, and a woman runnin a business. I helped.’ 

‘The boy was a pickpocket.’

‘Why wouldn’t I want to die?’ 

That was the only long-living internal conflict Arthur had ever had about the woman, who now sat curled onto her bed in her cabin. Bloodied hands wrapped around a bottle stolen from Bill. She had been crying. Glass was smashed on the windowsill where another bottle had yielded willingly to woodframe.  
She sat shrouded in glass like an image burnt from a story book - a woman drowning in glass and her bloodied hands cradling it all as she attempted to drown herself in a drink aswell.  
‘Wha- What happened?’ Stammered Arthur, taking in the slow trail of tears forming in her eyes, the dejected stare that had gone dead and glassy. The only sign of life: a small movement occasionally to bring the bottle to her full lips, pale and cracked and bleeding from the cold it seemed. She had been an illusion to everyone this whole time. They saw what she was not, a saviour for them, like Arthur and Dutch, they took her for their hope. She breathed it, passed it onto people, kissed their foreheads and they were saved. That was not her. That would never be her. They were watching another woman and she knew it - maybe that is why she hurt so much. She shot and she killed and she did brutal, unmentionable things to people and she only ever lived her real, hateful, bloody life behind a closed door.

‘When are we going to the O’Driscoll camp?’ she stated, deadpan.  
This might well just be another occasion where she drank herself away sullenly because of something she would never tell anyone, Arthur concluded internally.  
‘Well you aint better so you’re not coming.’ He said, using a sleeve of his thick, furred jacket to sweep some glass off the foot of the bet. It rattled onto the wooden boards. She lunged then, Sean’s borrowed coat sliding off her shoulders and glass that had settled onto her lap when it had shattered now spilled, tumbled, rattled to the wooden ground.  
She would lean forwards, formidable if she felt dangerous. 

‘Oh I am. I aint sittin here waiting for someone else to call me for stitching yall up. I’ve done my share. And don’t say its dangerous or ill cut your fucking tongue out.’ She threatened, leaning forward and disturbing more glass shards.  
Her hand had been stitched and needed bangaging, he noticed.  
12 neat stitches, carefully tied in rows.  
Although, they looked like they had been done with someone’s wrong hand, which meant she had gone and done them to herself, stitched her own right hand with the wobbly ties of her left. It looked like the glass hadn’t yielded so easily after all.

‘No. Not happenin-‘  
‘You ain’t Dutch okay. I know you like to throw your weight around, but I don’t answer to you frankly- and you seem to forget that don't ya?’  
Arthur stood up and left.  
This is why he was always conflicted with the woman. Able as she was to handle the camp, she was fire and fury and blood and violence and it was easy for him to forget that when they sat drinking coffee on early mornings, or while he sketched her idly on dusky evenings in camp - often passing to a new page to continue or to simply move on. It was easy to forget her nature when he wasn’t on the recieving end of it.

She stood up and followed him, sweeping the dark greatcoat back over herself and raising the bandanna around her so it protected her neck from the cold winds that kinved them with fingering stealth.

The men were mounting horses. So she mounted hers in return. ‘Mr. Pearson, Mr. Smith. Look after this camp while we’re gone!’ Yelled Dutch over the cacophony of agitated horses. The Count paced, head held high as if he already had a victory under his belt. Like Dutch, he was righteous. 

Bluebird was wound tight as a noose beneath her, he paced angry, high steps while tossing his head up and down. He had picked up on her pain and was drawing out his own. Arthur’s horse, still fresh from Adler ranch -skewbald coat like chestnut mud in snow- had his ears flattened down, nose up in the air. It was a tense gesture from a horse, to show fear or anger. The horse looked at her with molten brown eyes like warmed, muddy water. The eyes were kind, but the body was cruel.

Reaching into her greatcoat pocket, she knew there would be some scrap of _something_ in her pocket to wrap her hand with. 

The horses set off, and she had her reins slung over her left arm as Bluebird moved in time. The leather straps pinned to her chest while she worked to cover her 12 neat stitches. They were carefully tied in rows.

Once finished, she released her tight grip on the reins, shifted her lower leg back and dropped her heels in the stirrups. Her knees were tucked hard into the knee-rolls of her saddle, and she lifted her weight slightly off Bluebird’s back. She was letting him fly. 

Beside Dutch, at the left hand, she reined her horse in as they approached the cliffs.

These O’Driscolls did not know her. They had never met. And maybe they were innocent in some regard. But then again, it did not matter. She had anger and she had targets.

A perfect storm.

Dutch and Arthur placed themselves at the top of the cliff. Bill and Javier moved downslope into their position while Lenny and Micah took their places on a flat plain of snowy cliff. She had the right mind to push him off. Someone needed to get in her way. She wanted to kill someone. Arthur was her target earlier, now it was anyone willing. She’d even kill Sean right now - if he returned this second she might just put a bullet in him, all while wearing his coat.  
God, she wanted to kill someone. 

She followed Arthur and Dutch down the hill, palming a double-barreled shotgun and some residual pain from her hand.  
She blamed herself for gripping the bottle so tight when she threw it. Charles had been lucky he wasn’t in the cabin at the time.  
Isn’t everyone just so lucky today. Good for them.

She wanted to shoot them all.  
Brazen, not even bothering to crouch, she waltzed behind cover nonchalantly. She returned Arthur’s frustrated gaze, yet with a touch of venom behind it. If she were a dog she’d be snapping her jaws at him, tongue peeking out between sharpened, ivory teeth. Drooling for flesh to just _yield_ beneath her jaw.  
She’d be wolf, on second thought, not a scrawny dog. 

Slugs dropped carelessly into the chambers and snapped shut with bloodthirst, she leaned casually against the wall with Dutch and Arthur. It almost looked comical, like she were simply leaning for a trolley to stop in the street for her, or a shopkeeper bustled for goods she had payed for. It could not have been more incongruous. But then again, she wasn’t afraid of dying. 

‘I’ll take the lead,’ mumbled Arthur, crouching and slinking off to Micah and Bill, they aimed slowly. Precise. Accurate. Deadly.  
She was coiled like a spring, and yet that relaxed her. She would lean languidly backwards if she felt relaxed, after all. 

Arthur took his shot. The hounds of hell were released. Hades had sent his beasts to ravage the land. His fires dragged up the sides of cabins in the form of streaked blood. She stepped boldly out of cover, two iron barrels pointed right at a black-clad O’Driscoll boy. He blanched, panicked almost, and before he could even blink, before he could even reach for his trigger, two holes had been torn through him. Lead had ripped him apart and passed on through, he seemed split almost as his chest was opened and blood poured forth like Neptune’s oceans coming to wash her hands clean of this deed.

Onto the next.  
She moved again, long legs striking into cover, sliding her against a crate haphazardly thrown to the floor in the chaos. An overturned cart proved cover for the defensive O’Driscolls, so she dashed, rising against the snow and the blood soaked ground. Bill was beside her then, portly and intimidating. Four barrels. Two very poor souls. Two more lives ripped in half as roses exploded calmy against the wall behind them. 

Onto the next.  
Arthur rolled in the snow with an O’Driscoll trying to force a knife into his windpipe. Steel was about to pierce pure flesh when she rolled the filthy boy away with the hardened heel of her boot. He was shocked and scrambled on his back in the snow.  
A snow angel formed beneath him.  
She painted it red. 

Arthur stood, unshaken. Admist a clash of worlds - the world of the living and the world of the dying men. Moaning, screaming how Davey had when he was shot. How Jenny had as she was ripped out of life. How John had when he realised the bullet had not ripped through him, but the woman who had stood in his way to protect him.

They all scream eventually. She screamed in her sleep. For all the times she didn’t when she was awake.  
The screams all sound the same eventually. The same note of torture peaks and the cresendo of sound drops like a wave, it plunges and then breaks before subduing. Only here, it broke before death. Before another bullet shook away the scream. Before iron kissed their foreheads and lulled them into oblivion. 

Again, it was. Over. It was gone. The sickening silence when a firefight ends was heavy. Like a bloodied rag or parchment dripping with ink. Or, like a body, pinned down by 3 miles of snow. That’s how she felt now, looking around her. She felt no shame. She felt no remorse. She just, felt heavy.  
While the men looted, she mounted and paced Bluebird beside Dutch as she waited.  
Bill procured some dynamite, and Micah offered some heavily drawn O’Driscoll plans. Like Cain and Abel bringing their offerings to God, the two brothers. Sons of Dutch, bringing him offerings.

Camp was in high spirits when they reurned. The O’Driscolls had been dealt with. Tonight, they would taste the metallic taste of chains breaking, they would taste freedom in their gilded cages. They may be free of Colm for now, but Dutch still held them tight like bullets bustled into chambers ready to be fired. 

And she was his left hand, so, chances were she would be the one pulling that trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry ... i had to reference ‘Stand Unshaken’ at least once guys. it had to happen :)


	5. Superiority

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> superiority ; the state of being superior than others

Spring crawled through camp like a beaten dog. Ice melted muddy onto the floor, snow retreated from the frontiers and grass dared to poke up from the trenches here and there. A war was being fought under her heavy work boots, worn and suppled from years, years, years of riding. Of walking. Of running. A thaw was setting in, and the camp was thrust out of the snowstorms of the last few days and into a sullen springtime. 

Pushed like a hand pressed in the hollow of a spine, only to tumble unceremoniously into the abyss. 

The sky was still dark, even for dawn. It was the edge of a page, burnt black at one end while it glowed soft orange at the other side. Two clashes of colour warring out across the heavens.  
It peeked behind the horizon, grazing softly behind clouds and the world was blackened orange for a while; night time sumbitted to dawn. Spring dawn reigned superior. 

The main cabin was deserted. The logs from last night simply smouldered and left smoke streaking up the chimney. She struck a match, tossing it casually into the stove while she bent for firewood to be dropped into the blackened mouth of the fireplace, like tar had set in and sucked the light from it.  
All but a tiny match, burning against the dark. Casting shadows up the brickwork like a lantern in a cave, a bonfire in a cavern.  
The blaze took up slowly, and she stretched out her elbows to lock them and warm her frozen skin against the flames. 

She would need water.

Snow was abundant so she simply had to step to the boundary and dip a bucket to the floor. Not even spring could remove all the snow.  
She placed it over the flames and let it boil. Nothing nasty in there as long as she boiled it. It would have to do, really.

The herbs in her satchel had dried since she had plucked them on her hunting trip. That was best, really. Dried herbs were easier to work with. 

A mortar and pestle made short work of the dried leaves, grinding the herbs up in their stone jaws. Hosea had taught her this method, and she had developed a fine knowledge of herbs and combinations that provided relief from burns, wounds, bites, lacerations, stings, you name it.  
She knew what to do for it. 

Tipping some of the boiled water into the mortar, she mixed until it was a fine sludge. It smelt wonderful, pine and mint, sage and yarrow, earth and growth.  
She could not promise it would taste wonderful, but it wasn’t for eating anyway.  
Leaving it in the mortar, she dusted her hands of herb residues, yet the smell lingered. 

Coffee now. The water was boiled anyway.

One percolator was filled with coffee grounds and boiled water was added. It bubbled, frothed a little as the liquid morphed and dissolved the coffee within it. Engulfing the dark aroma. Bitter. Rich.  
Arthur liked it like that.

She dropped into the chair by the fire. The one she had dragged over the last time she had been here early morning. Feet propped up in the same place on the table, she leant back. Languidly. She was relaxed. Sipping coffee like she hadn’t freshly washed her hands of blood from men she did not know. 

Arthur was silent when he walked into the room, dragging his eyes across every surface - seemingly for some company.  
It was funny, because he couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. Yet she was the only person in the room. 

She seemed happier this morning. 

Arm outstreched, she offered a cup to him with her eyes closed and head tilted back to expose her jugular thrumming slowly with life. 

He took the bitter liquid. It was just how he liked it.  
He raised the drink at her and lowered his head so he wouldn’t look into her eyes just yet.  
Still unsure of how to feel, really, after yesterday’s display.

Really, he should thank her for it. And he shouldn’t be mad. The aftermath was just his way of processing - that she had leaned over him and cocked a barrel at another man’s head. 

She had got that out of her system now. Perhaps.

‘How’s that hand?’ He said, finally shouldering through the silence and sipping at the coffee.  
She started, legs twitching on their table perch slightly, torso jerking upwards so her head could rise to meet his gaze. It was like a puppet dropping to the floor and all the limbs neatly arranging themselves into a mess. She wasn’t expecting him to speak to her, she knew he had seen things like no other man but he had confided once, under a bottle of whiskey and a blanket that she scared him sometimes. He. Could be afraid of her?

Well, maybe not her. More, how she reacted to what she did. She washed her hands. She went on walking through the valley, even with a shadow of death lingering over her. She walked on the path of the right even though she was wrong. He knew there was remorse, he heard her scream for it - a noise like no other. Pitching and rolling, the cresendo like a dying man until it broke, snapped, fractured and became laboured yelling. It used to happen every night, when she was young and still painted her skin with guilt - now it rarely happened, only when she had it building up for a long time. And that is what he was afraid of - how easily she stepped away from it all.

‘Well. It aint gone but it certainly is something.’ She said, palm outstretched to him as if a hamsa would appear and see all things before it.  
‘Good job you did stitching it. S’pose.’ He deadpanned, placing the half full cup of coffee back on the table by her elbow. He tipped his hat slightly to brush off some stray snow and dirt, then attempted to leave the room. Not so much, as Dutch rolled into town on their fine morning. 

‘Interesting proposition I have here.’ He said, dawn was not sapping his grandeur and indulgent manner of speaking.  
Arthur looked tense, clenched muscle, coiled, wound, sprung, taut. What had she done to him? God, what had come over her? She was... She was sadness. She was emptiness. She was remorse. And she was guilt, as heavy pained and horrid as that was. She was guilt personified.  
Oh, Arthur. She is sorry, and she doesn’t know how to tell you.

‘What kinda proposition?’ She echoed, shifting in her chair to lean forwards. Formidable. She felt dangerous.  
‘That train that dear Colm was planning to hit- we take it from right beneath him. I have the plans that Micah found.’  
‘How helpful of him.’ Arthur mumbled, deadpan and crossed his arms in front of his chest. Weight shifted slightly, his hips cocked to the left in the pinnacle of a Grecain marble pose.  
‘Indeed.’ Agreed the woman, leaning back in her chair now, agitated. 

Dutch brushed it off - either unaware or not caring.  
‘So today, now the land has thawed we hit it when it runs through the valley. Gather Bill and the dynamite, get it rigged up nicely. We can be in and out quickly, get us some money and be on our way.’

‘So you mean to say that we hit a train quicker than a cheap whore, and bail with money we don’t even know is on it? Forgive me if ain’t trusting Micah’s bullshit plans that came from a dead O’Driscoll.’ She seethed, rising from her chair so quickly it toppled over behind her.  
‘Not a chance Dutch. People died getting us here. I buried people I loved on my way to this hell-hole. I lost people I loved and who loved me. This train, the money? It won’t quiet out losses - they died. They died for you Dutch, they died for me. I can’t throw away the chance they handed to me. We have blue skies outside! Let’s just leave. Get out. Bail while we have the run on the Pinkertons. I’m begging ya Dutch. Look at me and tell me we should just leave. You know I’m right in your heart- if there may be anythin’ left of it.’ 

He said nothing. Arthur said nothing, all he did was watch in awe at her. Her hands had splayed across the table and the plans, she had bent at the waist to lean across the table and beg. He was the guilt now, after that display he saw it all. She cared. She was love personified. She was a vision different life, long dead and taunting him. She was survival, salvation, superiority. The essence of life and love and growth. A wild and untamed thing.  
Oh, Arthur. He is sorry, and he doesn’t know how to tell her. 

It was no longer the three of them in the cabin now. The dead were weighing in the air now their names had been spoken and their memories dragged from the river in Arthur’s mind that tried to wash them away, filling empty chairs at empty tables where their friends would have sat. And then the living intermingled, Hosea leant against the hearth and listened to her shout. Charles and Javier crowded in the doorway intently, Bill drunkenly stumbling out of his own cabin across the way. Abigail froze, one arm raised almost as if she was a statue of agony, pain apparent.

Oh, the world paused. Only her, her embodiment of life was the only movement that existed. 

‘We hit this train, my dear. And we leave like you say. We do this. Now.’ Dutch swiped the plans from under her splayed fingers, actions smooth and taut. He kept smiling the predatory smile she knew oh, oh so painfully well. She had undermined him. And the worst part, was that anyone listening would have agreed with her.  
‘We leave soon. Bill, Javier: round up the men. Arthur: get Pearson to deal with that O’Driscoll boy. Hosea, Abigail: see to it that the camp is tidied up and readied to leave. Charles: horses.’  
His patience had worn thin.  
She had worn him down.

 _’I always knew you were a no-good kid.’_  
It echoed quietly in her skull. A memory calling to her like a stranger from the bottom of a valley.  
He had told her that, many, many, many years ago. He hadn’t meant it under the anger that first time. But now. Well, now he maybe did.

Dutch left. Abigail moved slowly to Hosea and they too left reluctantly, together through the other door to the cabin. Javier looked Arthur up and down. No body was speaking.  
Arthur unfolded his arms, took two steps forward and placed a hand on her shoulder. She was leaning on the table still, head down and tired. She looked so tired. She was so tired.  
She looked up slightly, nodded to Arthur, feathered his hand on her shoulder with her own touch. A graze of her fingers over his hand slightly. She had acknowledged the comfort and the moment was gone. 

Charles and Javier waited for Arthur to slowly leave her side. They walked out into the snow. 

The coffee was still bubbling over the fire.  
Rich, dark. Just how Arthur liked it.

She poured the last of the coffee out of the open doorway, stashed the mug of hers and grabbed the mortar and pestle she had left on the other end of the table.

It was for Charles, after all.

She found him in the barn, as Dutch had ordered him. One man to ready up 20 horses? Unreal.  
She held the mortar up and headed over wordlessly. He seemed confused, but she just grabbed his bandaged hand - removing the bandages, he turned directly to her. Torso facing torso. Once bare skin was revealled, she turned it over to see the worst part of the burn.  
Working wordlessly, she pushed his sleeve up and laid the mash over his burn.  
Oh, Hosea, you taught her well.  
She bandaged it up neatly. No need for stitches here.

She turned away, poured some water into the canteen to wash it and swill it onto the muddied floor - she stashed it into her satchel aswell.  
‘Thank you.’ He said, and she more felt his baritone voice than she heard it from a few feet away. He was unmoved, still standing over a damp bale of hay that had been found in the abandoned loft. Their last one now.

She nodded, still processing what she had  
done.  
‘He won’t listen to me no more. Charles. I aint useful to him. I’m dead meat.’  
‘Well dead meat makes you useful - We always need it for the stew.’  
‘You’re horrid.’ She smiled. 

He continued moving hay into the shallow troughs, rationing it as best he could between almost 20 horses. She moved down the line, brushing deftly and briefly to comply with Dutch, dear Dutch’s commands.  
She was in the middle of fixing Javier’s browband onto Boaz, when Pearson came for the O’Driscoll boy. He was hefted and dragged out with no resistance.  
She had killed men cold blooded, but somehow straving and subjecting them to people like Bill Williamson was even beyond her limits. 

Only the carthorses remained, harnesses latched up intricately. Charles seemed to struggle with the finer adjustments with his burn, but, together they worked it through.  
The men came in for their horses and their was only 2 remaining, Shires that dragged Hosea’s wagon. 

Arthur, Javier, Bill, Charles, Micah.  
The Adler horse, Boaz, Brown Jack, Taima, Baylock. 

They left and she tried to follow, running Bluebird outside and searching for Hosea in the crowd. Lenny and Dutch were already mounted outside. Good kid, Lenny.  
‘Hosea! There’s your two left in there. Everything is-‘  
‘Don’t let them do anything stupid. I can handle them now for the wagons.’  
‘This is something stupid, Hosea,’ she said, swinging into the saddle. ‘I can’t stop it but I can protect them.’

Hosea nodded. Dear, fatherly, Hosea. 

She moved to Dutch, yet she found Micah already halted at the left hand.  
‘Ah, see. You’re needed here to load wagons. Miss.’ Dutch soothed- aiming it at his former left hand.  
‘I’m sure that Susan can more than handle it. Loading wagons isn’t my job anyway. My job is to ride with you. Its how I earn my keep, after all.’

She moved forward, Bluebird paced tense and high-kneed on the spot.  
She was pushing her luck too far. Arthur looked at her, he didn’t know how to save her from this one.  
Javier was behind Bluebird, looking between Dutch, Micah and the woman.

‘What he’s saying, darlin,’ Micah started, leaning onto his saddle horn, ‘Is that you aren’t needed here.’  
She pulled her gun from its holster, one hand on the reins. An iron barrel yawned open in front of Micah’s forehead.  
‘You and I, we may be children of Dutch. That may make us family, but if that means I have to shoot you I will. You may be my brother in this place, but my blood isn’t yours.’  
Dutch laughed, breaking the silence. Hearty and fake and practised.  
‘Save that fire for the train, Miss.’ Dutch said, wheeling The Count around and trotting off.

She shook, gun still aimed steady at Micah and Bluebird lifted his forelegs beneath her. His ears flattened backwards to his neck and his haunches coiled as he reared anxiously, one foreleg pawing at the empty air as he screamed.  
The other horses moved past her where she stood her horse. Javier came alongside. He placed a soft touch on her forearm, and gently lowered her gun arm that was still out long after Micah had trotted down the path after dear old Dutch.

‘Don’t get yourself killed, querida.’ He said, watching her holster the pistol and they moved alongside the convoy of horses together.  
‘I won’t die at the hands of Micah.’ She stated.  
‘I don’t doubt that one bit, amor.’ He replied. 

And they rode on in silence. To the train tracks and the beginning of the end.


	6. Salvation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> salvation ; deliverance from ruin or loss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> been a while but im toying with a draft for a new story thats actually just gone up already- any Detroit:Become Human fans out there will enjoy it :)

She only wished she had pulled the trigger. Micah still swayed in front of her in time with his horse. Trotting beside Dutch. _Whispering foul things in his ear._

The ride to the track was hostile. Cold weather still wrought a tenacious grip onto the ground; frozen over and stilling growth of plants in its path. 

Snow hung tepidly melting from skeleton branches, a limp noose of winter threatening to catch her neck and strangle her as she rode by.  
Dutch wrangled his spiel about the nobility of their cause- this money would help them all back onto theit feet. It would, perhaps. But she still didn’t see it as worthwhile. 

The overlook was steep and gritty, loose rocks bustling between blades of eager grass. They lined up along the precipice, the tilt at the edge overlooking a small valley. Bisected by track and rail, the clearing was bunched like the fabric of a skirt and hemmed behind shrubbery-tied stitching.  
Bill had hitched Brown Jack to a tree below in the belly of the valley dip, while a few meters away he wrangled wire to explosive and strung it up to the metal track. He was working under the whim that perhaps, perhaps this order would yield good money and shove them along deeper into their own little world. 

“Arthur, go help Bill along.” Dutch ordered, casting his right hand in a broad sweep of the valley.  
The skewbald Adler horse wheeled on its haunches, ears pinned back slightly. 

Dutch twitched his head to the side, a summons for her to step up and fill the space Arthur had made.  
This would be quiet, under hushed tones and clenched, smiling teeth. Lest anybody hear them.  
“You have to trust me here, Miss. I’ve known you a long time and have I been one to lead you astray before? We’re family, always have been and it wont change so soon. You and Arthur, you gotta help me out, my girl -because you’re the ones that keep this whole thing turning. Don’t think I don’t appreciate the work you do, I know it, we all see it. But this is the way forward. Loyalty to family, where we all do out share. Trust me.” A glint of cold geniality. Falsity.

So when she opened her mouth to intervene, to simply speak her mind or say _something_ he would not even look at her. He had didctated her reply in his head, the wheels of his charm had run smoothly, and the drink that he offered in peace may have been forced down her throat, but she still saw herself choosing to drink it.

The horses behind her paced and twisted, corded muscle beneath evolutionary prowess. Boaz leant back on his haunches frequently, as if threatening to rear up and cast Javier aside. The man seemed unalarmed, that simply his mount was knowing something was about to happen.  
And it was.

Arthur approached and interjected between her and Dutch, Bluebird knowing his place and sidestepping away from The Count.  
“Sorted, I think,”  
“Good, now everyone. Be ready.” 

Cloth bound around a mouth. A gag. Chocking and cloying. Stinging lungs, burnt chest.  
It was only a bandana, but it meant so much more.  
It was a promise that something would be taken, removed and plucked from the plain of existance like it had never begun to exist in the first place.  
It meant that she was not seen, she was not faced, she was another armed footsoldier in the camaraderie of _killing._

It lurched, heavy. Overbearing. A goliath striding over mountain-tops like stepping stones in a river. Hulking metal just waiting to be warped and destroyed. 

Bill was staunch, hunkered behind a boulder with the detonator.  
They waited on the precipice. Waiting to be kicked off the edge and into no-mans land. Lined up and shot from chambers. 

Nothing.  
No kick to push over the edge. No crack of a bullet sliding out of the chamber to her being. Not a single expectation went along to plan. 

Cursing in different languages. Disappointment, surprise, anger, smug knowing. The languages they all spoke. 

“I thought you said everything was fine?” Dutch rounded on Arthur.  
“Oh so this is _my_ fault now?” The blonde threw back like a rock into a waterfall. 

Bodies dropped to the floor, Arthur, Lenny, Javier, and Her.  
Feet that moved on the running of smooth orders and command. Leading them to the edge. The very edge. Where the metal tongue teased from the tunnel and trailed down the tracks. They hurled, tossing themselves into their own abyss. That was the precipice they were ordered to fall from. This was the kick to the spine they knew would condemn them over the edge. 

Another body hit, struck target and fell. Javier left lying across the track as he cursed a word only his mother tongue would give to him.  
Lenny slid, a protruding hand that gripped rail and gave chance to scream for grace, for mercy, for all the wonderful things Dutch promised, for _help_.  
Arthur rolled too, a graceful landing onto the moving failure that was their plan. 

He reached and grasped Lenny, pulling upwards until he could be reeled in and yanked onto the carriage top. 

Meanwhile, she lay. Groaning into a pool of her own blood slowly forming.  
And eloquently, the only words she could really fathom:  
“ _Oh, fuck me.”_  
“Smart idea, throwing yourself like that.” Arthur said, picking her up.  
“Fuck off I had to do it. Just, landed in the wrong place.”  
She had landed on her right side, the wound that had half healed had ruptured and spilled her insides out onto her clothes and the chilled metal beneath herself. 

She stood, thoroughly shaken and ran, pained and warped after Arthur and Lenny. Dropped down into the carriage below, alongside.  
Both revolvers at her hips drawn and extended, pointed at chests or vitals she could reach.  
Arthur’s rifle struck the life out of people and she snatched the rememnants up, gathered like the glass shards from day before. Cutting and stinging hands and body. 

They moved along the carriages, Lenny fronting Arthur and the three pushing through. Arthur sprinted for the top of the engine and she lost sight of him, instead standing back to back with Lenny to push back the remenants. The broken, fractured, remenants of people.

A lurch, a shift and clash within her worlds as the train stopped. Footsteps outside reminded them to jump the metal. Hop the doorways. Bridge the gap from train to floor. 

Point position, behind a rock. 

Hooves approaching at breakneck speed and rifle fire tearing apart the treeline in intermittent bursts of smoke and lead.

The stragglers died, hands splayed out defending themselves from death as if they could close their eyes and pretend it wasn't there anymore.  
From there it was not her watching the events unfold. It was a body that bled again because the mind behind the body had no sense of self preservation.  
The mind had given up.

Bullet holes pinged through the metal of the final carriage. Dynamite tore the door off with its unbearable teeth. Meek men filed out, while brave men filed in and stripped the carriage bare. 

Arthur was due to clean up again. She offered to help out, but he pushed her away and called Charles to take her. The train was sent away with the hostages left behind for dead. Neat bullet holes surgically placed on each glabella.

“If you keep trying to get yourself killed Grimshaw is going to kill you herself for the amount of time she takes patching you up.” That was out of character. Charles was always quiet, he didn’t waste words. He rarely cracked jokes, or attempted to lighten a mood. So for him to do that then, to settle the weight of the ambience off of her shoulders, it meant things were serious.  
They rode a while behind the rest, slowly.

The lines, pain, hurt, misery were scraped out of her face and telling the worst story.  
“Maybe she should stop trying to patch me up.”  
“Dutch wouldn’t forgive that. Nor would anybody in camp. Except Micah perhaps.”

She could tell he was talking too much. He never divulged a conversation so one-sided.  
“Recently, Dutch would be glad of it. Rid a nuisance.”  
He gazed off to the treeline as Taima walked slowly. They would have a long ride to their new place as promised and he didn’t want the mare flagging later because of a stupid decision he made in the ‘now’.

“Perhaps. But that means you gotta keep going to prove him wrong then.”  
“I won’t be in his good books any time soon, I’m afraid.”  
“Never said you would be. But I’ve only been here six months, so I have no way to tell you what to do. Except from don’t do anything stupid and bleed out-remember?”  
“I didn’t plan on it.” She lied. 

Camp was not their camp. It was an emptied mining town, long abandoned. Carriages had rolled through it but winter had hidden their tracks. Swept them beneath a rug of cold and secrecy. 

Taima and Bluebird were appropriated for a wagon further along the convoy. So, freshly bandaged and still wounded, she hunched herself into the back of Hosea’s wagon. Charles sat on the top of a barrel beside her. Arthur reined the horses, steering and follwing the convoy while Hosea sat shotgun and made some poultice he had taught her many years ago. 

The horses cut through a river, strong current. Water sluiced up into the cracks of the wood and brushed the tops of her leather boots that dangled over the edge. 

The wagon lurched at dry land, tipping to the left as the wheel buckled and yielded. The horses bellowed at the weight shift and sidestepped with it too. Charles’ barrel had been upturned and several crates spilled from the back. 

Cursing, Arthur hopped down and waved the rest of the convoy off. Informed them they would follow along shortly.  
The four stood there and grimaced knowing the wagon needed to be lifted. 

Charles and Hosea bore the brunt of the weight and lifted the wagon enough for Arthur to roll the wheel into place. He held it, while she shouldered it heavily into place. Arthur reached for the bolt and screwed it tighter, Hosea wisecracking about his back while she and Charles deigned to pick up what had tumbled. 

There. On the cliff. 

Figures.  
Hosea waved, the people on the summit moved away quietly. Natives. 

“Think they wanted trouble?” Arthur voiced uncertainly.  
“No.” Hosea voiced certainly, climbing back into the wagon. 

They moved slowly through winding paths. Hosea recited histories of local native tribes and the armies, spun a tale of a small cattle town by the name of Valentine that they would focus their works on. Horseshoe Overlook. That was to be their new home. 

Steep cliffs gave way to yawning valleys. Trees were tall, coniferous in places but became evergreen as the valleys grew deeper and deeper. A river, rushing fast and flowing, meandering back and forth on itself out to Flat Iron Lake.  
She was snatched, pulled back and chocked by surprise as Javier emerged from a quaint treeeline. 

She disconnected. Embodied Charles’ quiet nature and found she enjoyed blocking out people for a while. Her body was too broken to focus properly anymore. She didn’t think it would be healing any time soon either.  
Javier held loosely onto the side of the wagon as they pulled up a thin bridleway into the forest. A clearing swept away trees, felled them and opened onto a flat expanse the valley below was at their mercy. 

And from where she stood in awe on the wagon, it was a king’s seat. A mighty seat above a collective people. A righteous place belonging to few and far between. She saw her world open its jaws and swallow the valley beneath her. 

It was all at her whim now. A vast expanse that vanished people, snatched them from their paths and spat them out _elsewhere._  
This was their new home.

But it didn’t really feel like it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** the glabella is a medical term for the space between and above the eyebrows ... just felt i should push in some obnoxious language there haha


	7. Taciturn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> taciturn ; reserved or uncommunicative

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mkay so happy (extremely late) new year firstly! :) hope yall had a great time and if you didnt then im sorry i hope this year is better for yall x 
> 
> secondly;;  
> so i uh. i had the idea for the end of this story and wrote out like 3 final chapters instead of writing this - so prepare for feelings you didnt ask for, some sad boi moments and some wholesome content ahead. also; smut at some point but i have yet to decide which character to shamelessly defile ..... >:)
> 
> tldr; sorry guys but its the wild west out here we have no laws anymore and i know how the story ends :/

Since the arrival, the moon had hung low on the horizon once, sunk below the sea level of the sky and drowned beneath the radiant counterpart.  
It had been a day, since her insolence. Yet lifetimes, voids, had passed and been filled in the violent silence of the night since.  
A day had been filled with gunpowder and misery, a hollow threat like a wound slowly peeled open.  
A bandage had been soaked through where stitches had failed and ripped in half.  
A night had been half-filled sittung beside a fire, watching a man she had never spoken to plead for someone to relieve him. She had known Arthur had dragged a boy from the O’Driscoll camp on their return to Colter. She had also been numbly aware he was tied in one of the old barns. She had never spoken to him, nor laid eyes on him until Horseshoe Overlook.  
He had been moved along when she returned from the train. She didn’t share a wagon with him. She forgot, easily, that he was still alive.

The boy, distressed, didn’t even know who she was. 

She was supposed to, by all accounts, be sleeping in her tent under Grimshaw’s orders to heal again. She was supposed to, by all accounts, be watched by Tilly as Dutch thought it fitting that ‘someone be watching in case she befalls some more injuries.’ She was supposed to, by all accounts, be answering to Dutch in the morning once more - her status must be settled as her insubordination was seen by all.  
She was not, by all accounts, meant to speak to the prisoner tied to the tree.

“Miss please. I ain't no O’Driscoll I swear. I only was with horses, promise. They don’t like me no more ‘an they like you.”  
His eyes pleaded through the murky shadows. A stray lantern from Pearson’s abandoned wagon glowed softly, under-lighting their faces.  
“Keep it down, boy.” She chided, unfolding her arms in order to silence him with her pointed fingers towards him.  
“Please help me- I don’t even know your name but I-I-I. Please. Just some food.” 

She’d been in his place. Overeager bounty hunters stringing her up for something she admittedly _had_ done, but they were not her justice. She had never answered to anybody but Death. The shadow she pulled from her own mind to scare others into their own silences, their own graves. She knew her master, immadiate master, Life. But she shied with fear and shame from Death, the ultimate master. Those who came and went in the meantime were simply temporary masters. She broke her chains all the same.

She’d been standing still too long and she knew it, the boy would condemn her for nothing, inaction. Cry out to help him, to plead that she should do _something_.  
She threw the thought between her hands, allowed it to breathe life and hope, allowed it to run between her knuckles like a poker chip dipped in rich arrogance.  
“Okay,” She breathed, “But say anything too loud and I’ll gut you.”  
She reached backwards, eyes still drawn into the face of a man she had both condemned and saved in that one dear moment.

His hands were tied and she wasn’t chancing it, so she opened a tin of canned vegetables from the wagon. Lifted it cautiously to his mouth and allowed him to eat. Probably the first in a few days since Dutch had grasped his newest plaything. 

Once finished, she sank to the floor opposite him, tossing the can aside.  
“Who are you.”  
Stated, not asked. Commanded, not requested. Demanded, not questioned.  
“Uh-I-“  
“Name, boy.”  
“Kieran Duffy.”  
“Kieran,” She echoed, tasting a new name on her tongue. The form of it in her mouth, rough and unsure, a loose rocky foothill of a name. She tasted the letters, like she had when Javier had tried teaching her Spanish and she had grasped it somewhat competently.

“And you?”  
The paled look he gave after the syllables spilt from his mouth through the spitting silence showed his regret.  
“Sorry I-“

She introduced herself, allowing him to taste her name newly on his tongue just as she had. Her name was paradoxical, a name that suited her yet just outright _didn’t_. Her name was honey poured over thunder, sweet but promising pain underneath if you felt too deep beneath the surface.

“So tell me, Kieran Duffy,” She mumbled, looking up at his bound form from where she sat on the ground beside Pearson’s cooking fire.  
“What’s a boy like you doing with the O’Driscolls?”  
“I just looked after the horses honest. Colm, he-he-he ain't like you fellers. He has a lot of men he ain't even know working for him. But they’re all afraid of him so they do it.”  
“You’re a nervy little fellow aren’t you? Anybody told you that?”  
“Well if you were tied to Colm’s tree wouldn’t you be afraid?”  
“No. I’d be welcoming of a knife to the belly.”

His skewed look bought answers his unspoken questions would not.  
She just looked down and skimmed her hand back and forth over the coolest part of the fire’s tender tresses. Teasing flames licking up her skin as she glanced through the heat. Close enough to warm, but not enough to burn. 

“I’m getting older, and, kid, I’m a woman. It’s better to just shoot me because the only work for women is whoring or sewing it seems. And as you can see I’m no seamstress.” She gestured down at her clothes, muddied yet beneath the grime there were some haphazardly repaired patches. Not terrible work, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of work someone would gladly pay for.  
“I only worked the horses. Please, you gotta believe me.”  
“I believe you, but that don’t mean nothing, kid. I got no power to save you anymore, I can barely save myself. If anyone knows we even talked then I’m shot and something worse comes for you.”  
“I believe you.” 

And painfully, that was the most genuine thing he could have said to her.  
Suddenly taciturn, she had the urge that she would much rather plunge her hand into the flames and feel the flesh burn, than she would be in his shoes. 

She nodded, the guilty feeling in her stomach telling her she was on borrowed time for the camp guards to rotate slightly. Sometimes, it felt more like the camp guards were keeping her _in_ than preventing entry to others. Tilly should still be asleep where she was supposed to be watching the wounded woman.  
If she wasn’t, well nobody denies a bottle of bourbon gifted as a surreptitious offering. A plea brewed dark and fiery and poured from glass into flesh. Nobody denied bourbon as blackmail.

“I wasn’t here. You don’t know me.” And she vanished into the shrubbery at the edge of camp in the same manner as she had materialised beside the man. She skirted low and quiet as ever around the hedgerows, moving towards the hitched horses and dangerously, fleetingly close to Lenny leaning on guard duty. 

Edged away from the wagons where Karen and Mary-Beth sprawled out on the floor. Slided past Sadie sleeping on the bedroll. Glided behind John’s tent where Abigail softly breathed for once; it was rare she slept in her _husband’s_ tent, she stationed herself beside Strauss behind Pearson’s wagon. It was odd but, there were no questions asked because then she would give no lies.  
Hunched low towards the main campfire just past Arthur’s wagon. Her silent stirring towards her own tent was nothing more than a breeze grazing canvas, a ghost passing down a hall, a mouse disturbing a shrub.  
She slept between Arthur’s wagon and the main campfire, slightly away from Dutch’s central tent. Granted, the white fabric was drawn shut for the night, but the longest way around camp was the best way to avoid rousing wrath at midnight. 

It was best to wait for morning to rouse itself; to roll deep into the horizon and kick the moon from it’s own bed like a lover tossed aside come dawn. Shielded modesty hidden behind clouds and only clouds now. Bare for the world to see. Bare for the world to lay silent, unspeaking judgement.  
And so she did wait until morning. Allowed it to swallow her inky skies and abyssal heavens. Then rustled the danger headfirst, like kicking a caged rattlesnake just so you heard it hiss in arrogant dismissal.

“You heading to town?”  
“Oh not you too,” Arthur mumbled, checking the horses were tied properly while back in the wagon Mary-Beth, Karen and Tilly chattered blithely about finally seeing other people for the first time in weeks.  
“I just gotta get out of here a while.”  
“Well. Fine.” He submitted, unable to deny her unusually anxious frame. 

So as song took hold of their travelling companions, camp drew back behind the leafy curtain and resigned its front to the world. Forest guarded it tighter than a corset held onto a cheap whore.

Then as Arthur steered measuredly towards Valentine, another man tore his wagon down the muddied path, allowing the horses to veer in opposite directions around a tree and bellow in terror as their harnesses ripped and their knees locked to draw a sudden stop. One bolted to the right, cutting painfully close to Arthur’s path and galloping across the tracks. 

“Are you going to help him Arthur?” Begged Mary-Beth, all young pure womanhood and innocence born of story books. Yet she could protect herself and that was the most alarming thing of them all.

“I’ll go see what I can do.”  
It seemed the gilded cage Dutch had wrought was working well enough, the women around Her seemed to be exuberant, as if this little freedom was _actually_ theirs to do whatever they desired. If only they would grab it, then they would find no resistance in leaving.  
Not that they would leave, because they would be stripped of the protection the cage brought them. Yes, it kept things in, but it kept them out equally as well. 

“I was just tryna impress the ladies,” Arthur nodded, taking the reins back up and carrying on towards the main thoroughfare.  
“You’ve got a heart, deep down.”  
“If you weren’t here I probably would’ve robbed him,”  
“But you didn’t!”  
No, Arthur would not rob that man and She knew it. She had lived with him long enough to know that Arthur may contempt orders from people, but he carries them out nonetheless. He hated Strauss’ lending schemes, and the beatdowns that followed. Bruised knuckles like angry words resurfacing onto the tongue after the conflict long concluded. Arthur perhaps wished to be seen differently, but a man on the side of the road sparked honour more than it did avarice behind Arthur’s eyes.  
The noblest of men, perhaps?

Valentine itself was small. A livestock thoroughfare, small business, rural opportunities.  
Saloon, Stable, Sherrif. Store, Doctor, Gunsmith. Bank, Butcher, Barber.  
Hotel, Auction, Church.  
Simple life and simpler yet people.

“We do what any self respecting maniacs do - set the women to work!” Jeered Uncle, leading Arthur towards the store. 

“You’re awfully quiet.” Arthur had stated that, yet it still sounded like a question.  
“Ain't like you to complain when I’m quiet.”  
He shrugged, as if unsure what his answer would bring. Topic diverted.  
“You coming to the store?”

She instead chose to sit outside on the bench, waiting for Uncle and Arthur.  
Karen led a man into the hotel by his hand.  
Mary-Beth vanished down a sidestreet. Tilly wasn’t spotted.

Running a hand through her hair, she only discovered how disgusting it was. Tangled where it was tied back, muddied from her train jump, still bloodied from her murder.  
_That needs seeing to._  
Clothes in dire need of a wash in certain places, but muddied clothes weren’t amiss in Valentine. Her boots weren’t faring too well either, she noted. Cracked slightly from the watery snow they’d been subjected to, soaked leather had frozen and begun to break slightly. The soles struck with stones dug deep into the grooves. Streaked with debris. Buckles dulled by dust and scuffed beyond belief.

Kicking idly against the wooden shopfront, she waited.  
Uncle came out first, proudly brandishing bourbon with a wry grin.  
“Ladies first!”  
That perhaps was his best quality: offering liquid fire that burnt as much coming back up as it did going down. Arthur arrived to snatch the bottle away briefly before handing it back between the two on the bench.

Footsteps.  
Mary-Beth.  
Information.

“...posed as a servant girl, usually works. They said there was this big train passing through country heading to Saint Denis. Rich passengers, quiet country.”  
“Yeah Scarlett Meadows, I know the place-“ intervened Uncle.  
“We gonna rob it?” Cruel enthusiasm for such a young girl.  
“We’ll see. Where’s Tilly and Karen?”  
“Watched Karen go into the hotel,” The other woman added, nodding to the doors across the street. “And Tilly, well-“  
“That don’t look good.” Arthur rose.  
“I’m finding Karen.” She decided.

Sliding through the quagmire of the streets to the hotel, she bypassed the clerk entirely.  
“Looking for someone,” She announced in passing.  
Turning muddied footprints to therop of the oak stairs, she heard raised voices. Yelling. Struggle.  
The door the sound permeated from like a petulant child kicking at your ankles to make you stand up and play, a dog weaving between your feet to make you toss scraps away idly, as a bird hopped from branches to purposefully elude you.  
It was a door though, so it happily cracked beneath a heavy boot, cracked from snow or not.  
“Get outta here pal! I’m getting what I paid for!”  
“Didn’t pay to beat up women did you?”

As many people would dispute, a drunken man doesn’t put up so well in a fight as they would have you believe. See, the anger is there. The arrogance is there. The bravdo doesn't shy away. They still have power to throw, but the key detail is missing. The reflexes are too slow.  
So it was a matter of seconds before the man’s forehead kissed the stone heart of the fireplace against the wall.

“You okay?”  
“Just a little shaken is all.”  
“Why’d you even go for it?”  
“Bastard was boasting about the bank, and I know it’s a small town bank... but it’s a livestock town. Sometimes theres good money to be made.”  
“Indeed.”  
“After you,” smiled Karen, while she stepped away from the door. 

“Are you okay?” Fussed Tilly.  
“He just punched me is all. She punched him a lot harder,” Karen said, tossing a finger over her shoulder at the other.

“Hey I know you, Mister!”  
Arthur glanced around.  
“Me?”  
“Yeah, you was in Blackwater few weeks back. With a bunch’a fellers.”  
“Not me, I ain’t been in Blackwater.”  
“Yeah, was definitely you.”  
“Listen, come here a minute-“  
But the horse had wheeled around and was gone. Suited man had begun to ride away.

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Mumbled Arthur, turning to see Her mounting a stranger’s horse.  
“Meet you back at camp later.”  
“Hey- that’s my horse!”  
“She’s only borrowing it!” Yelled Arthur, already watching the horse gallop off in pursuit.

So his last sight was of Her. Muddied hair and clothes, darkened eyes from under-sleeping, scarred hands from glass bottles, bloodied shirt from herself.  
And the only thing he knew to be true, was that Blackwater was a coiled rattlesnake. And they had stood on it, crushing it beneath a heeled boot. Not killing it was their biggest mistake, because now the snake was shaking

Hissing promises of arrogant revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **i fucking forgot kieran existed like WHA-  
> so this is a 100% organic way of introducing a character i assumed id already mentioned.  
> but whoopsies from me - amirite??


	8. Ostracised

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ostracise:  
> [past participle: ostracised] to exclude from society or a group

The edge of a precipice is a dangerous thing. It provides safety for those at the top when below is naught but a crawling, squirming mass of swarmy hands like bees tumbling and screaming from the bee box.  
It provides terror for those at the top when a hand is placed between the shoulder blades to cast down the righteous to those who mourn below. Tumbling off a precipice was something she herself had done. She had thrown herself headfirst into the abyssal masses below, only to land and split and break below. She had caught herself on the barrier and hung as if her hand had strung the noose herself - the choking collar submitting her to life held her tight in place, and now it held another man in place.

“Oh please, you gotta help me!”  
“Why are you spreading lies about my dear friend? We haven’t never been in Blackwater.”  
“So why did you chase me?”  
“I have an unfortunate face.”  
“Oh yes yes. Me too. Please help me up.”

 _Save those as need saving. Kill those as need killing._  
She reached out her hand.

“Oh, Miss thank you.”  
“Now, what’s your name, sir?”  
“Jimmy Brooks. Miss.”  
“Now. I’ll remember that, Jimmy Brooks. I’ve got a good memory.”  
“I haven’t! Not one lick! Didn’t see you or your Sir in Blackwater. I never did.”  
“Get outta here Jimmy Brooks. Before I change my mind on saving you. I think it’s best for both of us if we forget that happened.”  
“Yes yes yes. Of course Miss,” he stammered as he turned away, “But take this, you saved my life didn’t you?”

He slipped a tender posession from his pocket, seemed rich perhaps. Salvagable. Something worth selling, maybe? Silver inlaid, but it was probably only steel.  
A pen. 

“Why thank you very much, Jimmy Brooks.”  
Pocketed. 

Her borrowed steed was stashed nearby before the grass ended at the precipice she stood on. Best return that.  
Right hand, seat. Left hand, pommel.  
Left foot, stirrup. Right foot, swing.

Slow plodding to Valentine gave her time. She would have to walk back to camp anyway, so she might as well linger in the town before returning to the writhing snake pit.  
A doe, bright eyed and spindle legged, dashed from shrubery and pounced across her path; it lingered in the road a moment then sprung away faster into the undergrowth.  
If she could, she would follow it. She would take Bluebird and simply trail the doe until it took her onto greater things or at least something other than watching someone suffer. She couldn’t abandon her family, she knew it deep inside. They still needed her and she was wanted there at least - for the time being.  
Yet there was the ache that everyone had, what if she had never followed Dutch. What if, decades ago she had walked a different street in Blackwater - she might not have killed a boy in self defence, panicked and threw his body into the water, regretted and begged a dangerous looking man in the street to shoot her.  
Then again, she would probably have died by now.  
Some street girl, not entirely defenceless, but a street girl none the less. Writhing behind Blackwater’s townhouses and shops, sleeping beneath nothing on roofs where ladders still hung for access, eating from that which she could pickpocket or was lucky enough to find tossed aside, living just for each new day - she was going nowhere in that life, besides an early grave. 

She would have been lucky to reach her twenties before a man would have found her, and lacking humanity would have taken her at will, left her broken and shattered in the streets. She would have been lucky to reach her thirties before she died of starvation. She would have been lucky to survive her childhood before the police ushered her along for disturbance of the peace and she was left without means to survive. She would have been lucky to live at all. 

In some regards she was lucky that she was found and taken in. In others not so much.  
To gain something, you must trade for something else. You always lose something in the process of gaining something.  
She lost time while gaining knowledge. She lost blood while gaining scars.  
She lost family while escaping Blackwater.  
She lost money while gambling.  
She lost lovers while running in a gang.  
She lost herself while finding a new version.

She would lose her life while giving someone else time to live, she supposed. It only seemed fitting.

“You really did return it? Why thank you Miss,”  
“Thank you for letting me borrow it.”

Now she had lost a horse while gaining moral standing.  
She stood outside the butchers, near the stables. Pondering.  
There was certainty in returning that the righteous sinner that was Dutch would be waiting for her. Just as a snake waits for a mouse to pass by, or a crocodile sits placid beneath the water for a doe to stuble upon him, Dutch would be waiting.  
There was certainty that she would return, but she knew she could afford some time.  
Decisive, her heel spun in the mud and quagmire main street as she headed for the hotel. 

Taciturn, she dropped two coins on the main counter and headed for the bath sign.  
“How’s your friend doing?” She paused.  
“She’s gonna be okay. Just a man throwing his weight around with her.”  
“I am sorry to hear that. Give her my best, God bless.”  
“God bless,” she mumbled, continuing on her trajectory.  
“We can wash your clothes too, Miss if you leave them outside the door.”  
“Appreciated.” 

The water was steaming when she arrived. Hat and satchel hung off a nearby chair. Gun holster slung carefully across the floor beside her boots. Leather suspenders dropped there too, unwashable items she wouldn’t part with anyway. They were important, a man would shoot you for your boots in some places, rob you for your satchel the next.  
They were hers to polish and take care of. She had bought them herself many years ago when she was fully grown and her growing feet wouldn’t waste a leather pair of boots.

Shirt and trousers were left outside the door atop her jacket. Undergarments seemed too personal to be washed by strangers, she could do it back at camp anyway. When she inevitably returned.

Leaning languidly backwards in the water. she felt relaxed. The liquid that gave the pure essence of life bled from its clear state to drink up the messes on her body. Her bangades had been removed too, and she appreciated the gunshot for what it was. A loss of something by means of gaining something.  
She lost blood, and danced with the idea of losing her life.  
She gained John’s life, defended him on the boat, and gained a mass of paled scar tissue to boot.  
Between right hip and navel, she had an almost circular scar where the lead invaded and stopped to visit. There was a small line of stitches faintly disappearing. The third set now? She was losing track.  
Her hand had healed now. It was just a white line from heel to below her forefinger- completely bisecting her left palm as if the glass bottle she shattered still taunted her. It was an underline. Telling where it all began. Or maybe where it all ended, she was hard pressed to figure that out.

Not marvelling at her own afflictions, she washed herself in the basin, layers of blood that was hers, that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even human probably. Layers of mud from several different towns, two states and _elsewhere_.  
Her hair was the worst and last thing she tried to control. Matted mud and blood came out first, then the grease from days of unwash, then the ghost of winter that still held onto her loosely. It untangled between her fingers after a while, long since the bathwater had gone tepid. 

The door spoke three times, at the command of someone on the other side.  
“Miss? We aired your clothes ‘bove a fire so they dried for ya.”  
“Thank you very much.”  
She waited until the footsteps receeded before she rose from the disgust of the bathwater. A towel from the walled rack was run through her hair and then down the body to dryly lick up water that escaped the silver mouth of the bathtub.

She exited the washrooms a short while later, cleaned all but her hat and boots but she would be walking anyway so it was best she hadn’t cleaned them.  
Adjusting her hat, she walked back past the butchers and headed off _home._  
It was just afternoon as she was leaving the town, Dutch may have hung on until then.

So, measuredly, she stepped down the road away from Valentine.  
The mud turned beneath her feet into softer ground, and finally less worn earth and stone on the bridleways through the forests. Small birds danced between leaves, watching her and slipping between her line of sight like a coin through water, sand between fingers, a bullet through smoke.  
Once they were there and then they simply, were not. Then back. Then gone. Then returning. Then vanishing.

When she reached the end of the road, she would turn up the small path into the small twigs pulling at her hair and the weeds caressing her boots. She would find one of the camp members guaring with a carbine, and she would be asked if she was friendly. She would be ushered past and into Dutch’s grasp once more. She would be lectured and her fate, like a hammer swing towards a window would either be utterly destroyed, or the swing would stop and spare the glass for now.

It was not a case of _if_ the window would smash, but merely _when_ the cold wind outside would be let in, to mauraude and accost dangerously.

Her footsteps became more even and measured, calmer, accepted and relaxed future actions levelled her pace.

“Who’s there?”  
“It’s only me, Charles.”  
“Were you even allowed to leave camp? In your state?” He lowered his voice, concerned and reached for her elbow.  
“Arthur took me into town with them earlier-“  
“We know. But I mean, Dutch? He knew? Because he seemed worried for your return?”  
“I am sure Dutch was positively beside himself for little old me.”  
“Just, don’t do anything stupid, remember?”  
“Uh-huh. Stay sharp there, Charles.”

And she reclaimed her even stepping into the clearing, dignity mustered by her clean clothes and healing wounds covered once more. Tangles and debris removed from hair, hat dusted as best she could without leather wax, belt buckle wiped down so it wasn’t so dull and void.

She had been remade in the light of the last few days. 

“Ah, my girl. You are back safe, I see. Come, sit with me and Hosea here.”  
That was what Arthur and herself knew to be Dutch’s panic commands. He insists, but in a tone that makes you believe his orders are freedom instead of a plea. He was desperate for this act. He needed her there, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to admit that and dull his shined pride.

“Back in one piece, Dutch.” She smiled, in an attempt to jovially match his desperate grasp for her presence at his command.  
“How did that business go, in Valentine? Arthur mentioned, a certain, issue...”  
His pauses were intended to be interpretated as questions, gaps to be filled in by her answers.  
“Yeah, there was a, thing I guess. Jimmy Brooks, he was. Said he saw us in Blackwater.”  
“And I trust you dealt with him accordingly?”  
Arthur and Hosea glanced between Her and Dutch, all four in the small circus tent that was Dutch’s residence.  
“Accordingly? He had a nasty scare and lost his memory. Terrible shame. He won’t be remembering us again.”  
“Again? You... let him, go?”  
“He won’t be talking, don’t worry.”  
“Was you followed?”  
“Was I? Followed? Who do you think I am, Dutch?”  
“Was you followed?”  
“No I was not god damn followed!” Anger was the hot coal on her tongue, spitting embers at the man she owed her life to, yet couldn’t bring herself to love unconditionally. He may have been her father figure, but not every daughter gets along with her father, after all.

“You let him go, after seeing your face around here?”  
“Like you said - we kill those as need killing. He didn’t need killing!”  
“My sweet girl, those words are not meant for the likes of that man. He knows us, and he is around here somewhere, knowing we are around here too. You feel safe now?”  
“Dutch lay it off, I wouldn’t have killed him either.” Arthur stepped forwards, honesty opening his chest to Van der Linde.  
“Well then you are a fool all the same as her. Get out, you. You’re a danger while you’re healing up again, girl. Best you stay in camp to rest up. You’ll be right in no time, with us here to watch you.”

As the rest of the exchange was mainly hushed, the tone saved for scheming, the last few words were spoken loudly and congenially, as if he was simply promising her bed rest and not curfew and camp arrest. 

The camp guards would be watching closely, tonight, it seemed. Making sure nothing was out of place.

And watch, they did. Charles swapped off and joined the evening campfire, and Karen dispersed to take his place.  
Meanwhile, between Arthur beside her and Javier on the floor at her feet she sat at the fire and rolled a bottle between her palms tentatively.

Obsessive palming of glass between sips, dipping head low and quiet in the shadows, she listened. Hosea was telling tales of teaching Arthur how to fix a poker game, and Javier sat tuning his guitar half-listening.  
Bill walked back and forth from the five finger fillet table with Lenny, to the stew, to the beer and back again. He only paused for a game here and there with Micah before moving along again and pacing. Reverend was lying face first on his bedroll, whiskey filled his belly into oblivion. John sat beside her, on the edge of the log, nodded his head and passed a fresh drink down to Arthur.  
“You wantin’ some?”  
“Sure,” she said, finally executing her own drink and starting a fresh one newly delivered to her palm.  
“How’s the scar?”  
“Not as bad as yours, Marston.”  
“I gotta thank you for that, ya’know.”  
“What?” She parroted, binge drinking whatever she had at hand now. Her bottle had gone and Arthur’s left his hand willingly after she pleaded with him through a second’s gaze.  
“For the boat.”  
“Oh. That. Don’ worry, I got me a nice little tale to tell from that.”  
“Better do it more often then,” Grinned the Mexican man at her feet.  
“No gracias, amigo.” She replied, beheading her latest drink.  
“¿Por favor?” She said, gesturing at the untouched drink beside Javier.  
“Si, porque tu es muy bonita ,” He replied, not even turning and looking back at her. She knew he was smiling.  
“Indeed.” She replied, snapping the neck of her newest bottle.

“You learnt that?” Arthur asked, confused. “Javier actually taught someone? He had time for that?”  
“A little here and there while riding places. Comes in handy ya’know.” She replied. Hosea had retired himself, Charles drifted away silently from the group onto his own bedroll. Javier moved to unoccupied space.  
“Oh yeah? When?”  
“When I gotta speak Spanish, ya fool.”

John departed, deciding to be fatherly for once and go see his wife and child. Bill returned from his newest circle of the knife table, Micah in tow.  
“Play us a song, greaser,” He smiled, dropping onto a crate and leaning over the fire.  
“Lay off.” Arthur warned.  
“Excuse me?”  
“I said, play us a song. Greaser.”

Nothing. She moved slightly in her seat but Arthur placed a hand on her knee. Dutch would throw her out for starting a fight. She was on thin ice now.

“Hey, amigo. You listening?”  
“Micah, shut it.”  
“When you gonna fuck off back to Mexico? Huh?”  
“After I carve your eyes out. Bell.” Evened Javier, cool across the face of fires.

Arthur stood, firm grip on her shoulder intended to look friendly and relaxed, but was biting down now between her clavicle and shoulder blade.  
She _chose_ to follow him away from the fire.

“I know it’s tempting but don’t kill Micah. Ain’t worth getting kicked out for.”  
They were heading to her tent and her murder of the drinks was settling in. Bloodied regret of killing the glasses weighed heavy on her roiling stomach. 

He shied her inside, and turned to leave once she was sat on her own cot.  
“Arthur.”

She heard him reply, say her name and only her name. Letters dropped from his tongue like bullets from a chamber, punctuated by a curious question mark.  
“I can’t do this anymore. I made bad choices but this all feels wrong.”  
“We’re gonna be fine. Dutch has his plans. I trust.”  
“It just don’t feel right.”  
“I understand. Don’t feel good to me either.”  
“Just don’t die, stay around for me please. You’re the only one here that’s been around all my life. Like a brother. I don’t know, just someone I trust. Just keep on coming back for me. You’re all I’ve got left to live for.”  
“What about Sean? Little Jack? The girls need you too.”  
“Sean isn’t coming back. Nobody comes back from Blackwater. Jack ain’t my kid, and the women do fine with each other for support.”  
“Sean will come back. Bastard’s like the plague. Amount of times I tried getting that boy to fuck off and he always comes back to us.”  
“I know.”  
“Sleep this off. And don’t break your fucking stitches again.”  
“I won’t.” 

He stood up, placed a hand on her shoulder in a platonic support and walked out of the opened tent again into the blackest night.  
The lantern outside burnt bright, a guiding star. 

She closed the tent to stop the lights and rolled over in her cot, boots and bandoliers abandoned beside the bed.  
Her tent was small so the shadows splintered off a tiny fragment of spaces, dripping into her eyes like the opened wounds they really were.  
And as her tears fell and dried in their tracks, the serpent outside coiled and died with sunrise. 

But not before it spawned a hundred more legion to take it’s place.


	9. Behemoth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> behemoth; huge or monstrous creature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact; in 'Exit:Pursued by a bruised ego' hosea and arthur discuss Boadicea (arthur's old horse) which is the name of the queen of a Celtic tribe that fought against a roman invasion.  
> second fun fact; Tacitus (the alias arthur uses frequently) is the name of a roman historian and politician.
> 
> so our boy arthur liked his roman history huh?  
> anyway sorry i thought that was cool.

Taunting rattles of metalwork were her dawn call. The ringlets inlaid in girths, browband and snaffle jerked plaintively in open air, slid slow over the muscles of a mount. Lenny had returned, anxious and crashed into camp from his travels with Micah previously. Hectic and unstable, the boy had torn through the hedgerows and told Dutch that while gone, Micah had been close to lynched.  
_Good. Let him die, string him up, you bastards. String me alongside if you wish, just as long as he dies._

It was wonderfully placid without him around. The curfew she was under seemed less punishing than if Micah had been around to lay hands where they were not entitled to, along the wood grained tables to claw for her. Like in her head when she slept she saw him reaching for vitals, twisting his nails beneath her veins and snapping them from her body. Her nightmares tore away at her and she woke a fresh layer of disgust every morning. A fresh set of horrors that bored into her eyes and couldn’t be washed away, couldn’t be flushed out by drink or drug or slumber. The things she saw at night, they followed into dawn. Legion, they crawled up her ankles. They held her back. They slipped into her days when she was hoping they had gone. 

For the last week or so, she had slumbered. She had watched the comings and goings from behind her cell walls and menial roles. She had been forbidden from following Arthur, John and Bill to the O’Driscoll camp with Kieran. Dutch wouldn’t allow someone so, _injured_ to go into such dangerous waters. His son, Arthur, would take her place. His daughter would not follow her brothers into battle tonight.  
Yet they had returned from the depths, blood soaked and seething, yet one of them wrought with iron forged freedom. 

Kieran had saved Arthur. And bought some slight freedom with the price.

Now Arthur was saddling his mount, the Adler horse still fresh beneath him. The leather protested against the movement, metal slotting into place beneath hardened skin. Arthur was taking Lenny into town to distract him before work had to be done.  
“Take me with ya, please?”  
He froze, back facing her.  
“Come on. I’m not dying, and you know it won’t do no harm. Arthur, I gotta get out of here a while.”  
“It’s not up to me, you know that. I can’t do anything yet.” He was pained when he turned to face her. She had shrunk beneath the last week or so. She didn't seem so tall recently, as if her slouch had become her natural state.  
The camp had shouldered her, and she suspected it was Dutch’s doing. Planted suspicion in some members of camp that would believe it.  
Molly. Bill. Strauss. Uncle and Swanson.  
There were some that heard but were reticent to do anything to be seen so close to her, even if they believed nothing of it.  
Most other women of camp, Javier and John perhaps.  
And there were those who still talked to her openly, knew nothing by it.  
Charles, Arthur, Sadie. 

“I know you can’t do nothing. I just thought I should try.”  
“I’ll see if Dutch has changed his views. But I doubt that.”  
“Thank you.” She patted his shoulder and turned to leave him there. 

She had some jobs to be seeing to around here anyway. Alone.

Arthur and Lenny trotted away towards Valentine. Javier and Bill were on gaurd duty. The women were set to washing around camp. Kieran was quietly brushing the horses. Uncle was sat alone by the fire, which was odd as Swanson should’ve been around somewhere. Strauss sat sourly scribbling in his ledger. _Honest work from dishonest people._  
Grimshaw approached, somewhat softer than usual. The longer She was stuck under camp arrest, the more empathetic Grimshaw grew.  
“I don’t suppose you have a second for me?”  
“Anything at all, Susan.”  
“Say, don’t tell Pearson this but if you happen across some herbs when you’re back on your travels... I don’t suppose you’d have any for seasoning?”  
“I’ll do my best, Miss.” She laughed, weak and dishonest laughter. She was not happy, anyway. 

The hay bales were easy to lift, only the twine dug along her scarred palm when she gripped for too long. But the horses needed to eat, didn’t they?  
Back and forth became one blurred line between what she had done already and what she would continue to do until the bale supplies were exhausted.  
Finding she was unoccupied, she would pull her weight like her earlier days. Before Dutch let her run jobs in groups with the boys, she was the labour lackey. 

So now, she sat beside the hitching posts, her usual spot as of the last few days. She waxed up saddlery left behind or unused, repaired frayed edges with a paste made from tree sap - Hosea showed her it years ago and it hardened perfectly over loosening stitches in leather.  
Metalwork was polished too, first washed in cold water then rubbed down with oil soaked rags and rinsed again. As long as she’d been shooting and running, she had spent an equal amount of her life fixing and rebuilding. She didn’t just know how to destroy. She could repair. 

Then by midday when Javier was leaving guard posts, he came to stand by her briefly as she rethreaded the blanket from Boaz’s saddle.  
“Mighty fine work, chica.”  
“I try my best,” she replied, not looking up at him just yet.  
“That one came from home.”  
“Home?”  
“Mexico. A gift.”  
“Ah. I see.” She did not see. Only finished her threading.  
“Pues, Gracias. Amiga.”  
“No es nada, amigo.”  
“Te debo una.”  
He walked off, leaving her to find a new job to idly fill the space in her day.

The grain sacks were easier than the bales, and she could throw them over her shoulder and heft them over to Pearson.  
“It’s meat we’re needing really. Need to send one of the boys out hunting soon.” The unspoken words of: _”I’d send you but you know I can’t.”_  
“Mighty grateful though, Ma’am.”  
“I’ll see what I can do about the meat, though.”  
“Everything is appreciated. You know that.”  
She did, and she did not.

“Has anyone seen Swanson?” Called Grimshaw, and the women left at camp came from behind wash basins and wagons. Strauss didn’t look up. Pearson glanced at the woman in front of him holding a sack of grain. Uncle was asleep beside the fire. Dutch leant against his tent frame in the afternoon sun. The only men left around camp were either drunk or on watch and they wouldn’t be any use now.  
“Miss Grimshaw, Is there something wrong?” Exhaled Dutch, lavish lungfuls of cigar smoke peeling from between his lips and coiling between his fingers.  
“Swanson hasn’t been seen all day.”  
There was tense silence between the camp members, as if they all knew something had to come to pass eventually.  
“I’ll go look for him.” Offered Dutch’s ex-left hand. He could not deny her so publically. Not when all she had done was bear manual labour for a week inside camp.  
Still after a minute or so, there was murmuring behind Dutch, around him and her. She set the last grain sack down slowly beside Pearson’s wagon and walked off. Head down, it seemed she had been denied and would sit in camp still. Nobody expected her to leave within the hour though. And nobody noticed it happen. 

She had slunk from her tent and around the back of the washing area, as she had many times that day for grain or hay bales. The subtle difference this time, was that she clutched a stuffed saddlebag in her hand. Nonchalant, she headed for Bluebird and slid leather over skin. Freshly polished and waxed, it was supple as virgin waters untroubled by rain. She checked a rifle was stashed beneath the fold of the saddle before she swung a leg over her horse. 

She had two trips to make. 

First she would ride to the train station nearby, where when speaking hushed to Charles as she slipped out of camp, he said Swanson had headed that way last.  
Upon arrival, Bluebird seemed like the tension had ebbed from his muscles on the trek over, he was not tired, simply suppled.  
Swanson could be heard inside, drunkenly yelling over poker.  
“Ah, Miss. Care for a game?”  
“No. I’m here to take this man home.”  
“This the husband?” One replied, tossing an easy card over the rim of a disapproving stare.  
“No,” She replied, hustling Swansom from his seat.  
“We ain’t finished here, Ma’am. Still got cards to be played.”  
“I think this fella is mighty finished, don’t you?” She said, turning away from Swanson for a minute, to argue his removal.

But he seemed to have removed himself. 

“Fuck.” _Eloquent. Ladylike._  
“Excuse me, friend. You didn’t happen to see a drunk preacher out here did you?”  
“That way. You’ll smell him first.”  
“Indeed.” She mumbled, turning a freshly polished boot into the direction he had gone.  
He was found tussling a shepherd, rocking insults back with random drunken preaching. Sporadic, he balanced.  
“Swanson! Get off him!”

“I said, lay off.” She echoed, pushing the shepherd back by his shoulders.  
“Lady-“  
“Sorry, fella. My friend gets mighty confused. Turned idiot I’m afraid. I worry too much about him, so simple, you know?”  
“You outta keep him locked away!” The other man replied, sucking a bruised knuckle tenderly.  
“Oh, we tried, believe me!” She replied, threateningly jovial.  
“Well, ma’am. He appears to have gone again. I’m afraid.”  
“So he has. So he has.” She returned, turning only to see him stumbling along the railway bridge. She knew Hosea would have been thrilled by her acting. 

Sprinting would have once torn the stitches in her belly, but they had healed over under Dutch’s arrest and now she only felt the wind protesting her breathing as she ran after him.  
“What are you doing, preacher?”  
“My foot appears to like this spot and wants to stay.”  
“Pull, you fool!” She screamed, yanking the ankle before the beetle-husk of the train scuttled too close on approach.  
It yielded, and she pushed the drunkard to the edge, against the railing as the wind bruised past beside the metal ribcage of the train.

He passed out shortly after that, and she was left to sling him over Bluebird and drag him home.  
Before she could get entirely into camp, however, she stopped before Charles’ post.  
“Take him in, will you? I want to get us some meat for stew.”  
“That’d be a welcome change. It’s been an age since we had meat.”  
“I know.” 

Weeds and bulrushes brushed her calves, crouched and shrunk into the undergrowth. A flock, flitting wings and fluttering ruffled feathers shuffled into her line of sight. The first shot would have to be perfect, as the rest would be certain to leave once the wood split the sky. The second shot would have to be lucky and precise if she wished to drop one from its flight path. Into her lungs she drew deep breaths, swallowing the thickened air as if she had never drank before. As if she had never felt the kiss of wind into her trachea. She was filled with the movements of the pure element within her, roiling its coils. Legion, it swarmed through her ears and pulled her into the depth of her being. Legion, is twanged her tendons under muscle memory. Legion, it clouded her hear until she was sure she was so distracted that she would miss every single shot. She didn't, though. Charles had taught her in Tall Trees surrounding Blackwater how to properly hunt. Before that, all she knew was how to skin whatever someone else brought her. But after Charles had bestowed a bow upon her, she learnt self-reliance. Hosea's herbs, Charles' hunts, Arthur's shootouts, Dutch's persuasion. They brought upon her a new life like a tree bough slowly accumulating snow, she was the one picking up skills from others and adding them under her heavy limbs. So there, she did not miss her first shot. While it may not have been perfect, she managed it. The second shot too, even with legion itself writhing inside a skull she had long thought empty.

It was safe to say Charles was pleased when she trotted by him again in the late evening, two fat turkeys strapped to the sides of her saddle, and a thick young doe slung behind her. A saddlebag stuffed with fresh herbs for her stocks.  
“Busy?”  
“Very.” She replied.  
“I’ll give you a hand with it.”  
So she swung herself off her mount and dropped in line beside Charles, who removed the doe once they reached the hitching post.  
“Can you give him a quick brush, please Kieran?” She asked as she unstrung the turkeys from her saddle. Neat shots to the head and to the throat, just as Charles had instructed months ago had felled them from the sky.  
“Of course, Miss, Ma’am.”  
“It’s neither, but thank you.” And she walked away from the nervy man, following Charles and the limp doe.

“Been hard at work, I see.” Remarked Dutch, glancing at Swanson sleeping soundly behind him.  
“Pearson said we needed more meat, felt I had to pull my weight there too.”  
“Of course, My Child.”  
She didn’t dignify that with a response.  
Pearson seemed thrilled at the new delivery. She was glad somebody was. If Arthur was back perhaps he would’ve thrown a thank you her way. But he wasn’t yet, he was still out with Lenny despite leaving at dawn. Truly, she knew they would both struggle tomorrow morning, so perhaps she would be serviced to tend to them. Unless Grimshaw took it upon herself to intervene, as only one truly concerned would. mother hen watching closely. Tutting and noting well-being. Circling and watching always. She snapped, pecked behind the heels of stragglers and bade them to catch up to her, lest they fall off the tracks and become lost to the abyss. She was marching everyone along the precipice and hoping they all managed to stay steady and subdued behind. Those who disobeyed her law, her ruling knowledge would be lost. She knew what she was doing, if only a few saw beneath her hardened, enameled exterior. The few who saw, never forgot.

Sitting alone by the embers smug contempt, she knew what it was like to fall. She had fallen out of her own life, as if she had been dangled over the edge of a wagon door and dropped so er body would simply tumble and fall to complete her descent. The yawning precipice opened its hungry, lazy jaws. It waits. It always knows that there will be a victim, but it never knows precisely _when_ there would be a stumble followed by a shuffle and ungraceful tumbling. She had been at both ends of that, and she enjoyed neither. 

Pearson's stew was thick for once, and not in the usual congealed manner of 'thick', and this time it wasn't soupy and watery either. It wasn't more of a drink than a meal, as tonight there was thick chunks of turkey meat tender and stringy into the bland soup. Grimshaw was nowhere in immediate sight, and the woman at the campfire didn't particularly feel like dancing with a hotter fire by walking around camp to find Susan. Dutch would burn her worse than any fire if she stepped too close. He would throw her further than any fall from the edge. He would destroy her worse than any form of torture she could imagine. And she could imagine _a lot_ of torture. 

After dusk had swung low into the valleys of the sky, and the white paint splattered starlight cast itself over the canvas of the campsite, she retired to her own tent. Slowly slinking around as best she could to avoid the man she had slighted more often than not recently. Bluebird was asleep standing, and true to his word Kieran had brushed Bluebird and even unsaddled the beast for good measure. A token of goodwill in return for the tinned vegetables she smuggled to him. She would remember that, that Kieran knows where to throw his congeniality. His trust. His faith.  
She ducked into her own second world, beside Arthur's empty bed and undisturbed wagon.  
There was something wrong here. Something out of place.  
Her solace had been disturbed when she wasn't there to defend it. Nothing missing, just something felt wrong.  
And then she noticed it. A small piece of burlap had been folded in half and placed carefully atop her aged bedroll. It didn't appear threatening, just a small piece of beige canvas, yellowed by time and frayed at the edges by what seemed to be small slices with a knife. It looked, at first glance like the bag that would hold a razor to prevent it blunting.  
There wasn't a razor inside, however. 

It was only a knife. A small blade, neat and slender. _A threat? A promise?_  
No, she need not swing her fingertips away at the mildest brush, it would not hurt her. It was a pine handle, inlaid with some sort of bronzed metal design. Curving, slender lines thinner than stitches. The blade was not a razor, though it was as thin and sharpened as one. This was simply too delicate and deliberate to be a threat. She slipped it between her fingers, dancing it smoother than water or silk or cashmere. Metal flows like no other substance on Earth. It simply moulds, melts, transcends movement when manipulated properly. And she had played enough knife games with dangerous men to know a fine knife when she sees it. She suddenly itched for some five finger fillet, but she knew in the already waning lamplight that nobody would care enough to wake for that now. Later, she would make the metal dance for everyone else.  
But for that night, she simply slid the metal snake back into it's holder and succumbed herself to sleep gradually.

Many years ago she used to startle at the sound of hoofbeats in the morning. It used to mean one of two things: that she was out in the wild and alone on a job, hoping that she could survive a night either without sleep or without being robbed blind by people who used to know what they were doing better than her. Or it used to mean she was still so painfully young and alive, in the days when she would pitifully rule the streets of Blackwater. When the mornings would be signaled by the approach of hooves, feet, voices. An alarm that dragged her by the hair into the newest day and sent her scrambling into cover. If they saw her in the belly of the town, right underneath everyone's noses, they would move her on. You simply didn't stay hidden underneath poeple's feet forever, you would be discovered all too easily. Those who did what she did, lived unorthodox inside the brick and cobblestone organs of the town, they did it outside of the outskirts. Slightly wild but readily tamed and chained to the streets.  
Now, though, hoofbeats approaching in the mornings meant that there were murderers heading home hungry for breakfast. In particular, these hoofbeats approaching meant Lenny or Arthur was stumbling back. And as she slipped through the flap of her own tent, she saw it was. Sullen and looking like they'd clearly seen better days, they looked heavy in spirit but lighter in the pockets.

''So, that was a nice quiet time?''  
''Very.'' Returned Arthur, looking slightly unstable still as he dropped from the back of the Adler horse.  
''He's pretty, but he's not quite Boadicea is he?'' The woman asked, heading over to help unsaddle the mount.  
''No horse will ever be Boadicea.'' Yet even at his words, Arthur patted the Adler horse fondly.  
''He's growing on me, though.''  
She smiled to see Arthur so engrossed in his horse, studying him in that sullen way he'd trademarked through the years. He was a beautiful horse, she noted, as she slid the reins over his head. Fine breeding, American Standardbred. Stocky powerhouse, not the tallest horse going but there was speed stored in the wound muscles. Strong neck, if perhaps he was a larger animal he would pull a wagon without issue from the broad shoulders and thick neck. Splashed brown and white markedly made the stallion stand out in the crowd of dun, palomino, bay that the camp seemed to easily acquire. Boaz and the Adler seemed to be the only horses around with individuality. Overo and Paint in a sea of bland coat. 

  


''Anything interesting go down in Valentine?'' She asked, working away at the stiff and stubborn girth.  
''There are so many things from that I just don't remember. Any trouble yesterday?''  
She paled at the conversation,turned her back to the crate Arthur was positioned on while she unburdened the horse.  
''Nothing interesting. Swanson being Swanson. Got us some meat too.''  
''Dutch said you were fine to go?''  
''Not exactly.''  
''Shoulda known.'' After a pause, he rose shakily. ''We'll talk later.''  
He didn't seem disappointed, she knew what that particular expression would look like when etched onto his sombre face. So she nodded and realised that, like her stitches sometimes people need time alone to heal. 

It turned out, that for Arthur, his version of 'later' simply meant a few hours. He found the woman sitting slumped onto a seat at a table in the mid afternoon sun, facing the steaming stew pot and talking over a game of five finger fillet. As she had promised to herself the night before, she was playing with the promise of dancing silvery metal slivers slithering over her skin between the harsh rock forms of her knuckles. It was impressive. Shame she wasn't as delicate with scamming and conning as she was with knife games. ''Impressive, amigo. Pero, es una lástima que no va a ganar,'' goaded Javier.  
''Oh really? Come on then buddy.'' She tossed back, spinning her newest pride on the table by a finger of pine wood.  
''That is a pretty knife, true. But you won't win with it.''  
''And you would know?'' She sneered, blind.  
''I did leave it in your tent after all.''  
''That was you?'' She blanched and paused in her metal twist.  
''I told you yesterday; I owed you one for the repair you did on my saddle.''  
'Was it that good? Boy I'd have _bought_ you a new saddle if i got that as a thank you!'' Ribbed Arthur. ''Mind if I have a word?''  
''Sure.'' She said, sliding the blade back into the original canvas slip and rising to follow Arthur.  
''What's the problem?''  
''Hosea's got this idea to go hunting, and I can't leave you in camp again. And before you snap at me- I know you ain't defenceless or useless around camp, right. So just. Go get Bluebird before Dutch has at me too, woman.'' He didn't meet her eyes and some part of herself thought this was a conversation borne of pity more than anything but she'd take a pity hunting trip with Arthur and Hosea over another day or so under camp arrest. And if this was the beginning of her return to freedom, she would grab it gladly by the throat with both hands. He had begun to walk away slowly, heading towards his own mount. Fumbling, she struggled with her pocket.  
''Arthur, wait!'' She called, trying to freeze him in his path. Wordless, he grunted an acknowledgement and turned to her. ''Thank you,'' She said, finally extricating what she intended from her pockets.  
''What is it?''  
''Well, I won't use it, and it's too pretty to sell so you should have it. As a thank you,'' She repeated, thrusting the object at him. Almost as if he thought it would be a trick, Arthur glanced up and back at the woman twice before taking the steel pen from her outstretched fingers.  
''Where'd you get that? Steal it?'' He asked, walking beside her to the hitching posts.  
''Nah, I got it from the fella in Valentine. For not killing him 'spose.'' She said, looking ahead and stuffing her hands in her overall pockets.  
''Shoulda sold it.'' He mentioned. That was his way of saying thank you, brushing off the topic quickly. A man more adverse to thanks she never did meet.  
''Maybe. But it's yours now.'' She shrugged. He noticed she was standing tall again, not allowing herself to weary and shrink under the weight of pride anymore. She was not shrinking beneath the complete fall through of how she used to live. She was not losing the will again, she was standing straight once more. Completely shaken, yet still standing. It was commendable really.

''So. What's Hosea after this time?''  
''Some massive grizzly he's spotted. Wants to head into Valentine first though, got some business with that young shire of his.''  
''Selling? He's too fine an animal for that.''  
''Well nobody uses it. Besides the wagons, 'spose.''  
''I'd stable it if I were you. With your track record with horses you could do with a stocky backup.''  
''Girl, you've lost as many horses as I have.''  
''Not as often as you do though, boy.'' She smiled, waving a free hand that wasn't buckling up a girth beneath Bluebird towards Arthur.  
''I'll leave your sorry ass in camp if you keep this up. You're worse than Sean when you're like this.''  
''I'm hurt.'' She laughed. And if before all her laughter inside camp had been empty shadows of the sensation, this was a genuine laugh. The action seemed to have a life of itself, breathing and filling the air around her. It was the essence of jovial. She was coming back to herself. Standing straighter, talking more, laughing properly. There was still the small shadow of absence, that she wasn't still the same person from Blackwater just yet, but she was heading on her way. It was the best thing to happen recently, in the face of all the loss. There was some gain within the voids left by missing bodies. Just as there was something to fix in the gaps left by disrepair. Even if Arthur didn't laugh, he wasn't displeased with the development. His companion was coming back to him, despite the things he wasn't able to alleviate or help her through, she was fighting through everything alone: exclusion from camp, the punishments she placed on herself mentally, and the amount of weight she bore for someone absent that she couldn't quite return to just yet.  
''Ready to head out?'' Hosea called, swinging himself onto Silver Dollar.  
''Can't leave quick enough,'' She mumbled, turning Bluebird around and vaulting his broad spine.  
''You decided what to do with that unruly beast yet?'' Hosea asked, watching Arthur mount the shire.  
A glance over at the woman, fleeting acknowledgement.  
''I'm gonna stable it. Seems too fine to sell,'' Arthur confirmed. She laughed again, smug.  
''Wise.'' She commented, bringing up the rear behind Arthur and Hosea, making sure the Adler horse followed in line for Arthur to swap in Valentine.

The dirty trails to Valentine seemed shorter, like they fell away before her horse into something else entirely. Her excursion the day before meant that she had a taste for the wilderness again; it was back in her blood. Like the sweet relief of whiskey and smokey singing at a campfire, it was an addictive feeling. It struck chords in the skin to be free, to feel wind move around your own being as if you were part of it all. It stung like leaving a lover's embrace when you left the restraints of open grassland for the restraints of city streets and civilised living.  
And sooner than not, the muddied world of the Heartlands shifted into the muddied world of Valentine. Where they brushed through like phantom visitors to the wooden blockade of the stables to leave a horse then to spirit away faster than they arrived in pursuit of dangerous pastimes. 

''So, Hosea. What's this grizzly like then?'' She asked, spurring a conversation up between the three like a particularly lethargic mount.  
''Massive, dear. I reckon between the three of us we could shoot it out of the mouth of a valley it seemed to move in and out of.''  
''Always up for a challenge.'' Arthur remarked, holding the reins in one hand as he lazily loosened his grip on the horse and let it stretch out at it's natural canter. His other hand alternated beetween swinging free at his side or adjusting the position of his hat.  
''Say, are we gonna be back in camp tonight?'' She asked, nervier than Kieran.  
''Probably not. Why, you adverse to roughing it now after all the time you spent in camp?'' Joked Hosea, curling over on himself in a form of a slouch above Silver Dollar's withers.  
''The opposite, actually. Can't wait to get away for a while without Dutch hounding me out.''  
''I think you're overthinking the whole thing, dear. You know him better than most. We all know that he would never throw you aside so easily. He values loyalty, and you're integral aren't you? Now, that doesn't mean his pride wasn't a little scuffed, but he isn't angry.'' Hosea was always the father of her and Arthur, and to an extent, Dutch too.  
''Plus, we know Dutch's temper. If he was gonna do anything serious, he'd have done it by now.'' Arthur added.  
''I 'spose so.'' She acknowledged.

Where they arrived at evening time, the paths were rocky foothills. Routes had to be picked out carefully in the dying light. But they made it, as promised. And as promised further, she would be spending the night away from camp and the tenacious vice of loyalty that came with it. So while she set a fire going in the confluence of the bedrolls, she revelled in the idea of free country around her. She was back into her days of work, of jobs, of her _life_. Arthur was busying himself with hunting rabbits, while Hosea tended fatherly to Silver Dollar, doting over the senior animal. That damn horse had been through hell and back, yet it held on better than most people. God forbid that horse ever died or it would be worse than when Boadicea died. Arthur was inconsolable, so she could hardly imagine Hosea's reaction to Dollar's death. She just knew it wouldn't be pretty.  
She supposed any camp member would struggle if their mount died. Javier would perhaps shed a tear or two for Boaz. Charles may lose his cool for once if dear Taima ceased to exist. Dutch would be furious if his beloved Count died.  
She vaguely remembered some while back, Mac had his horse shot from beneath him in a robbery escape. Beautiful little Haflinger, all golden coat and flaxen mane. Pink nose like a baby, white socks like a schoolgirl. That mare was beauty itself, yet she looked a whole lot different as she was shot in the chest and rolling in her own death and fluid mud. She only remembered so well because Mac Callendar had to swing himself speedily onto her old mount's back under the cover of revolver fire. He had cried when they returned to camp from that.  
Her old horse was a wild little thing. Bluejay, an American Standardbred. Coppery overo, wite splashes intruding the palest brown a horse had ever seen. He was likened to nipping and snapping hiss teeth at strangers, stamping impatiently when he wasn't in control. But she loved his fire. Adored that burly little beast, until one evening where he came down with colic in the night. His old age seemed to only draw out the inevitable, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, to end it. She was a deal younger then, so she had to get someone else to do it. She remembered stroking his tired forehead, offering him a final drink of cool water and a soggy sugarcube from her pocket. Then as she collapsed and begun to cry like a child, Arthur and Davey had to lead her away while Bill and Mac took care of the horse. She never saw the body, they had been sure to take her Bluejay as far away from camp as the tired beast would manage.  
She remembered the sound. The sound was all she remembered when she thought of him, nothing good. _Only goodbye._  
It was one single echo, a single chamber, a single bullet perfectly placed. She imagined a pair of hands held his head still while another ended his misery.  
Arthur held her still by the campfire, and when they all paled at the sound of that one echo, Javier simply played his guitar louder to make her forget for a second.

She wouldn't let Bluebird down like that, she concluded. Settled beside the campfire, she picked away at a small rabbit haunch and decided in lieu of the unsettled memories she wasn't so hungry anymore.

She regretted that the next morning as she found herself crouched in the undergrowth with Arthur, following Hosea's lead. She didn't want to speak, lest she disturb the silence that was settled over the working trio. Shamefully, she remembered that she wasn't really helping out here, letting Arthur set the bait in the valley mouth as she took cover with Hosea. She had followed them, not helped, only hindered. She had followed, not aided. She looked down at her crouched form behind a rock and begun to realise her place again.  


She wasn't allowed to lament her uselessness for long.  
Because a behemoth was tearing down a valley. A force of nature that moulded land like a glacier, overcame obstacles like a river, unwavering like a tidal wave. Roughened around the edges, obvious a life had taken a toll on the flesh. The bait had worked, just as Hosea promised. The bear was massive, just as Hosea promised.  
Arthur was sent reeling backwards, yet the fore of the grizzly had knocked him to the ground, pinned by the shoulders. His rifle had been tossed carelessly aside like a child's plaything being discarded for something more alluring. Meanwhile, any previous hang ups she may have had with her personal purpose were discarded and she found herself hurrying to shoot at the beast. Hosea was caught off guard briefly and stood a second or too before firing a single shot. Arthur stumbled, dropped and rolled underneath the behemoth. Underneath the jaws. Underneath the weight. Underneath the claws. Meanwhile the hunter's bullets lodged underneath it's squirming skin while Arthur's knife slipped under the soft throat of the beast.  
It screamed, tried to lean back and escape up the valley, but too much of it's blood had dripped from the slit under it's hollowed jaws and too much metal had embedded itself into the beast's brain. So it simply slumped sideways, leaving Arthur scrambling on the floor still, blood coated and unstable from the ordeal.  
''I think this was a warning for me to stop hunting such big game,'' Hosea commented, heading over to Arthur.  
''I think we fucked the pelt up,'' She noted, whistling for Bluebird knowing there was something to repair her friend in the saddlebags.  
''I'm not so sure, actually. Seems decent still. I'll get it off if I can.''  
''That had better get some decent money,'' Arthur said, bitter. She didn't blame him, but he was going to be a lot worse in a moment when she cleaned out his claw wounds.  
And she was right. He protested greatly when the flesh was being washed out.''Fucking, be careful there will you?''  
''Stop moaning, even John didn't whine as bad as you are now,'' she taunted, wrapping some of the deeper claw indents with a thin gauze.  
''Now drink this and shut the fuck up,'' She said, handing him a glass vial of medicine and gripping his free hand in an attempt to pick him up.  
''I'll take this to the nearest trapper and see what I can get back for it,'' Hosea said, levelling the pelt onto Silver Dollar's rump.  
''Come on you, best get you home.''  
''Yeah, yeah,'' Mumbled Arthur, mounting his horse beside Bluebird.

They didn't move initially, they first let Hosea trot off to the West, in the direction of Strawberry.  
''Hey, Arthur?'' She started as they walked back to pass through Valentine.  
''What now?''  
''Thank you for taking me on this trip, even if it was only for a day.'' She knew that he would be gruff and grumble, mumbling nothing but short words to brush off her thanks. But she needed to tell him, since recently she had to forcibly accept that people she loved were lost forever and under unexpected circumstances- most of the time she didn't get her chances to tell people she loved them properly and how grateful she was, life was all so unpredictable for her to not give Arthur the genuine thanks he needed. Even if he wouldn't say anything in return, the words were out there for him to hear if she never got another unpredictable chance to say something.  
''Yeah, well. Anytime darlin','' He said, then leaving them to ride on again in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this was a big boi chapter huh? took a while to finally get out but it was a lot of work :) if only i weren't so lazy.....
> 
> sidenote: i don't work from game transcripts for dialogue, so i have to do it all from memory. so sorry if its all a little inaccurate, i try to get it as natural and organic as possible :(


End file.
